. 
. iat 
fi a bray 
i ‘ ae 
it a A Hi Hite 
Hh Hy t 4 iy on 
ite! i . it Uf phn 
Hann ! nih nat Sony 
it | 
ut ita V a 
ee , ih ae 
My it it iatetitattet i ft Hy lat use 
ca art | a i ye 
inate ie ; Ltt te “ } fi 4 th . ure 
ae i Hh i! ite vis 
Soe Ly H , tet mi al Hi + Dinh 
EO At He i tu Hy Wut Ht it 
Ha ‘i i Ban | a tHe 
4 it ty <4 i iH s ly RHA oh - hours 
i yt HY a iy # + br 
a a coe 
. oH ae i io 
F “4 ’ : Pe ; Fare rr 
ae i i i i A i Dent 
tf aittitt | Haye aT 
a i‘ Hise ; ae 
nt He a ne i hi a a 
ia a 3 
oe a ee : i it : Bn t Ha nt oe 
Aye; A ihn Hh . 
a a . i a Hi a Bh Nt 
r i nit % ur i uu “t 
oa Ba f a a sa ae Na 
oe : dat at tf ty it i He ivy K wit aR Ms 
ay tt RH} a a oa i tH ae 
a as he aan HH i oo . 
HY lit ' He ce Bit rH rt i HH ie hit 
if i. } ae fide ih HS oH ia hh a Hi Rr 
Hi 8 Hh it ie : oe 
ie . atch ; ih ai Ba ut HH ae 
De if Hh pt ue i } Hie rt f at ae rf } } ret Hi hel pi 
ae sa Pani it rit iH Una! i ae oo 
ie Gk es At i int fi vi oN Ht ae 
nih i it tit a Ht ie He ! tH iste | i Hit ae a ae 
“ o A et ijt : a a ue - — 
it et Robt aa ah it ett H 44 ! pa Hs hh} r iets i uh 
hn Hae ite cite! Hi r tt JE} r HE ivi | Mh Hh Hie re tHH ‘ sth Hh hh oo 
i a oe iit tite ty hh i , mee Ht Hieth yee . i oo 
. he it i " bitat : +} is He 4 He ty Lh . v BY i? : LF Wh ‘ HH 
oo if Hi i t . : fe aie oo i ae 
ae i ca a) ae an ae 
a BR rt Hip i maint he _ : 
tat ai ‘ 7 HHA wd | fetch att is at tit a Hie ree HH iu in ee 
{ i if : te ; ee ih rh ; ae 
ia Ha Pine aR i ry Hie ree . ae 
. fut ee Hi 3 a a hb 
att Hh ae ibe 1 i Ni i uh ! ie 
ey tf in} Hal 4 uf ty i Hh ; Hin te we i) aa 
aa nats mt a ‘ jut i a 
me i ty rit , Het i it tirtts I 
Ht Hs F CS Hutt te a 
tH ae ite tite tits Ha oh (4 at HH a Hh 
ae Hh ih 7 i ¢ tte ti Ly fits a 
ch Hy Ce ) ‘i oe 
ict ie Hiatt a 
i au it nu ; it a 
Ad if 4 { Hy He ht Hin: a iv 
ij iit fit ae iA tt bhi ne -f 
oo Rh 
i. } if ae ae 
a : o 
i (t 4 | oo 
ae t ah iff tt tt oo 
nh ft sitet wT Hy be Bab # taht 
Hi au 
i : _ Rae 
Mia ii Ma HY ce 
mk att i a 
ae Bab i 
ue an rt en 
Bi ie Rr it a Ht ae 
os thir Fut a Ain 
a ii i ‘ oc Ht 
Hi Ha Bh a 
th . aR Ht He Hib 
Hitt rt tet ny) 4 . te u ta Han 
Mt s 7 ee uh Heh 
Hh 4 ie mu ta tI Hs 
it ; BS te Fr 
1 ry + : iret 
‘tf ret iit tif iti 
~ 5) & ¥ > FE : } 
‘ bik E ay + 
ui ve Y Mh (tit i 
{ MH Hi : ' th 
i ie 7 i it i 
| . Hf ii Ht K 
‘i i He Je t cM He 
tg HL i ’ i . , 7 4 ij * Aas | ¥) 
” Tie i a a i i : ae ; i a i iit 
ed Ht 4H itt , ut | HH Ht 
A Hitt hie itt Hu 3 J 
itt it it t i rt 
pinata a a | . Hs 
; i it i teh | HE 
prt i a i Heat tat! ui 
= ty cn i art ‘ $ i i i 7 
ttt nh rit Runt ht (i i itil nt 
r H if H } 
ae nh itt tile ie 
He i inky tit ut : tile 
a re a Hi i 
a ae ih 
wt a it a — 
tit , : hi . re 
Ht hh thet pth a 
py iH An _ Ht ee 
Ait nt I i tit Ht Ht 
ty ae a anh i a . me 4 
sa ff i i at uh { i 
sn a a i Hh 
i 
Kt ih a ia ih 
sityt tHHY ; it 7 
aa i! 4 ity Hite He 4 $-6- 
itt int ih ht titi htt f 
' ih! lo Hts Hi 
. ni ; ' tbe 4 
iti ah Hi i i i 4 t itt 
Hae Do it tif ' 
Hei a i i 
a 
ith ae 
a 
inh i 
wit 


sa" 


ste 
. : : 

| ag, 

. 

A) ona 

— 
sail 
ds ad 
er 
< 
“ 
f. 


* 


a oe oe 
a a oe) oe 
= = i = 
. 2 ? - = 
Ea = Fe 
r 


A 
PRIMER 
of 
MODERN ART 


A 


PRIMER 
of 


MODERN ART 
by SHELDON CHENEY 


with one hundred and seventy-five illustrations 


Bat 
ty 


PeaQan l AND LIVERILGH YT 
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 


ce 


ey: 
x win s 
7 _ | 
> ae : 
. -. 
= ~~ * " = 
. * 
Pj " . 
d oad r ; 
COPYRIGHT, waa, BY oe 
BONI & LIV ERI Gay tae 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED | 
STATES OF AMEBIOA 
First Printing, January, 1924 “4: Pe 
Second Printing, October, 1924 a 
i 
i 
> 
‘ 
* 
i. 
+ i_- - 


CHAPTER 


THE 
CO Nai Et Nis 


FOREWORD 
THE APPROACH TO MODERN ART 
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND . 
THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 
THE BACKGROUND IN MODERN LIFE 


IMPRESSIONISM AND POST-IMPRESSIONISM . 


CUBISM 

FUTURISM 

SCHOOLS, FADS AND SENSATIONS 
THE SWING TOWARD ABSTRACTION . 
THE ART OF MOBILE COLOR . 
EXPRESSIONISM 


THE GEOGRAPHY AND ANATOMY OF MODERN ART . 


SCULPTURE: IMPRESSIONISM TO CUBISM 
SCULPTURE: EXPRESSIONISM 


| ARCHITECT, DECORATOR AND ENGINEER 


THE CHANGING THEATRE 
AFTERWORD 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


INDEX 


113 
125 
155 
175 
189 
217 
249 
marie 
311 
335 
363 
371 
379 


Ww 


a 


FOREWORD 


N thus rushing in where angels fear to tread, I hope to evade 
some part of thé possible consequences by ‘entering a disavowal 
here at the very start: I had no-intention of trying to write either 
an exhaustive or in any sense’a final: book on modern art. My hold 
on the subject is as sketchy as “might be expected of one who has 
gone out frankly to enjoy and not to study-art works; my lists are 
largely records of personal, contacts with artists or chance meetings 
with their works in exhibitions; my background in history and 
theory is about that of any minor worker in one of the arts who 
also writes an occasional journalistic article. Under such circum- 
stances an exhaustive and scholarly treatise is an impossibility. As 


for finality, modernism is too much alive, too multifold, too fluid, 


for anyone really interested to try to stop the current and think 
about histories and authoritative rankings. It is the sense of alive- 
ness and flow, more than anything else, that I have wanted to convey. 

I have chosen the Primer method—and title—because it seemed 
to me that what we need most, to widen appreciation of contempo- 
rary creative art, is to escape for a while from High Learning and 
get back to a child’s directness of approach. Without trying to 


‘point out didactically what to see in individual works, without 


trying to add anything to them—you remember how the art-com- 
panion books ruthlessly chase down the last hidden meaning in a 
canvas—a Primer might, quite simply, lead on the interested but 


psi often puzzled Progressive Citizen, until he found himself on inti- 


mate emotional terms with modern art, with just enough of back- 


sround knowledge to make him feel at ease in such new surround- 
vii 


ings. That and nothing more is my hope for the volume. It is so 
much a product of a current phase of a great movement that I shall 
expect some later book to take its place before long; I should be 
disappointed if modernism did not move swiftly enough to make 
my ideas and data out of date in a year or two. In other words, 
I recognize that, in a creative time, what is modern today will 
not be modern tomorrow—and the fun is in being up near the 
front in your own day. 

I am not interested in putting forward or defending a Cause. 
There the modernist works are, themselves, for enjoyment. Being 
creative, they need no excuse, defense or pushing forward. But 
even while trying to keep that point in mind, I have probably turned 
dogmatic about some things that in the nature of art cannot be 
settled. Most of all, I have misgivings that I may have emphasized 
too insistently the idea of a search for form as the norm of the 
modern movement, when my better judgment tells me that artists 
very seldom crystallize any theory, or search for anything con- 
sciously. Remember, please, that the critic has an evil tendency 
to narrow things in, nail them down—and in your own mind make 
allowances, keep the border-lines fluid. © b 

As for the usual foreword acknowledgments, that matter boils 
down chiefly to cordial thanks to Mr. John Quinn, who has allowed 
me to see and enjoy his extraordinary collection of modern paintings 
and sculptures, and who has thrown light on certain phases of the 
movement which I did not know at first hand. I have become 
indebted in lesser measure to many people along the way, for 
services too various for mention here—but the book itself must be 
the answer to their kindness. I must add, however, that I not only 
have quoted in proper fashion from Willard Huntington Wright’s 


Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, but have doubtless 


put his ideas into my own words occasionally without any credit 
line—for which I acknowledge indebtedness (or guilt) here. I 


Vill 


suspect that Clive Bell and Ezra Pound might find a pat phrase 
lifted here and there from their critical works, if they read the 
book thoroughly—although I have tried to give them due credit 
in the text. The list of illustrations is placed at the back of the 
volume, and I have made acknowledgments there to those who 
have courteously supplied photographs. Alfred Stieglitz, to whom 
everyone interested in modern art becomes indebted sooner or 
later, has helped me particularly with illustrations. | 

No large part of this book has been published in magazine pages; 
but portions of several chapters have been rewritten from articles 
that appeared originally in The International Studio, Theatre Arts 
Magazine, Century Magazine, Shadowland, and the New York 
Times Magazine. The editors of these publications have kindly 
given their permission to reprint. I have also incorporated para- 
graphs out of a pamphlet, entitled Modern Art and the Theatre, 
which I printed and published two years ago. It achieved such a 
remarkably limited circulation that | am sure this reprinting of 
extracts cannot be considered unethical. 

And so I put my Primer before you, hoping only that it will 
serve to wipe clean some of the accumulated stains on your art- 
seeing spectacles, or that it may, in a sense, help you to find 
new eyes. 

SG: 

Scarborough, New York. 

October, 1923. 


ad 


IVR, ANTE EA CO) Od a 
TO 
MODERN ART 


" 


cr 


Sei mw eR ALT, BY .OSKAR KOKOSCHEKA 


HIS is an example of Modern Art. It is a good example: it has 

all the Earmarks. It is not in the least photographic. AI- 

most any student of drawing could copy the outlines and shading 
of the man’s head and hands more naturally. It is not prettily fin- 
ished—indeed, it is very rough. Lovers of Whistler, Sargent and 
Zorn will find its technique deplorable. One would say that this 
painter Kokoschka had never heard of Greek Purity. He seems 


3 


to have left out everything that makes art diverting and pretty. He 
has abandoned those very things that we all were so carefully 
taught to look for in paintings: sentiment, polish, literary interest, 
likeness, charm. 

A great many pictures of this rough sort are being painted today. 
There must be many people who appreciate and buy them, who are 
willing to overlook the lack of prettiness in a painting. Otherwise 
the artists could not afford to keep on making them, and there would 
not have been the enormous increase in the number of modernist 
painters and modernist exhibitions that we have witnessed during 
the last decade. Where so very many art-lovers have become in- 
terested, it hardly seems likely that they all are insane. It is just 
possible that they are finding something in these paintings that the 
rest of us have overlooked: that Kokoschka and his fellow artists 
have hidden something in the canvas that is more important to them 
than diverting subject-matter or polished technique. Even plain 
people very like ourselves are beginning to prefer Matisse, Picasso, 
Kokoschka and Derain to the more normal painters—people who 
admit that they get a sort of ecstasy from music or from standing 
in the Sainte Chapelle, and thrills from the early Greek sculptures, 
and a pleasant feeling from the stream-lines of an automobile. It 
is all very confusing. We are taught that one thing is art—and then 
people don’t stick to it. Is there something to be known .. . ? 

Let me right out with it: Not to be able to appreciate Kokoschka’s 
paintings, just because they seem rough and unphotographic, argues 
plain Ignorance. Continued dislike of modern art, in the face of 
all that has been written about it and after all the exhibitions of 


the last ten years, simply indicates a case of bigotry—stubborn 


4, 


adherence to a set notion of what art is, and blind refusal to open 
the mind to a new thing that is coming as surely as death or taxes. 

Now please don’t think that I am setting up as less ignorant than 
you on most questions. God forbid that I should so forget my 
place. But in this one little matter of art appreciation I have 
worked myself out of something that I look back to as a sort of 
prison. I should like to help clear the way for you, take down a 
bar or two, help you to blow some of the dust off your mind. 

I will add—what may or may not be a comfort to you—that if 
you are one of the ignorant ones, it is probably because you are 
highly educated. For education, as it is taught, is calculated to 
kill out of every human being whatever creative ability and free 
love of beauty the God of art and life has endowed us with. It 
is training to a formula that makes the Average Citizen resist vigor- 
ously any disturbing of the dust coat. Education is busy putting 
ideas into set places. Having ceased long ago to live with art, 
you probably learned all about it, and now you want it to stay in 
its set place. You even feel irritated when it changes its pigeon- 
hole, alters its dress or its form, or appears in a guise that puzzles 
you. 

The chances are you were taught a formula built on two specific 
ideas: first, that art is imitation, that one must look primarily for 
likeness to a model in nature; second, that art must be “finished,” 
refined, a sort of technical display. These two cardinal virtues of 
the centuries-long realistic era in painting have been called by many 
names: Truth and Purity, Exalted Subject and Exalted Technique, 
etc. These were the idols, the obsession, of correct 19th Century 


painting and sculpture. 


Just here I may be able to help you to overcome the disadvan- 
tages of your education, by suggesting that you were trained to 
a superstition and not to a fact. I can report to you with all the con- 
fidence’in the world that those idols have been overthrown. The 
modernists have discovered that both correct representation and 
technical dexterity can be relegated to a subordinate place, and the 
soul of great art still be attained. They have made clear, more- 
over, that it was over-emphasis on the imitative element, upon rep- 
resentation as an end in itself, that brought the world to such a 
sterile time in the arts during the 19th Century. The whole fallacy 
is summed up in realism. I cannot do better, in trying to help you 
to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastat- 
ing effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole. Con- 
sider the art world’s utter obsession with imitation, through cen- 
turies, and how it led to the reign of Naturalism in literature—and 
that we are still in that bondage. Remember how it brought ob- 
servance of the removed-fourth-wall convention in the theatre, re- 
sulting in our peephole playhouse. Consider how it brought about 
the limitation of architecture to echoes of recognized and accredited 
historic styles, until the race of those who once were the Builders 
of the world is almost extinct, and in its place a generation of timid, 
devitalized, cultured designers. And finally consider how dread- 
fully long has been the reign of photographic realism in painting, 
sculpture and the visual arts generally—so that there has been no 
major artist in those fields for generations and generations. 
Through all that period an artist’s originality consisted of swinging 
to a classic extreme if the romantics were in vogue, or to a natural- 


istic extreme if the neo-classics were in vogue, or to an escape into 


6 


Wee ci respALE, BY PICASSO 


romantic-sentimental pastures when the realist began to pall—all 
these things being limited in vision to what a man could see on the 
cutside of nature with his eye. 

The public—if one may borrow that pretentious name for the 
comparatively few people who trouble at all about art—were helped 
to an acceptance of this fraud, of a sort of photography masquer- 
ading as art, by the confounding of creative art and illustration. 


In the last fifty years illustrated books and magazines have become 


i 


so cheap and all-pervading that “pictures” go daily into almost 
every home in the land. The people have come to love these things, 
doubtless for good enough reasons, and they have been misled into 
believing that that love constitutes a taste for art. Naturally illus- 
tration is imitative. It pleases first of all by the exactness and neat- 
ness with which it imitates. I hope to show that art is of a different 
order of experience. 

We have the perfect example of this sort of corruption here in 
America, where the weekly Saturday Evening Post has, I believe, | 
upward of two million circulation, and its imitators many millions 
more. Its illustrations, as illustrations, are often remarkably 
good. Its cover design, for instance, is likely to be an amusing 
anecdote in color, a sentimental likeness of the insipid “magazine 
girl,” a clever simplified photograph of a boy in mischief, the Ole 
Swimmin’ Hole, Rover, Kitty, Old Dobbin, Great Granny, etc., ete. 
There probably never was one of these covers that had a creative 


flicker in it—and yet millions on millions of people know them as 


66 29 


art.” (Does not the astute magazine publisher give color to the 
idea by listing an “Art Editor” in the staff column?) 

The example may be a bit extreme. But only by looking back on 
the phenomenon of the spread of illustration are we likely to under- 
stand how a primarily imitative activity all but usurped the name 
and place of art over a considerable period of history and almost 
throughout the Western world. And if the example really is ex- 
treme, one can only reflect that the insidious poison worked hardly 
less thoroughly in many other directions than the magazines. Many 
a canvas out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would make a 


perfect Saturday Evening Post cover. That is the thing we must 


8 


recognize: journalistic art pervades our galleries, is expounded by 
the college professors, is discussed seriously at the women’s clubs, 
was set up as a model for you in your schoolbooks. A whole false 
standard of values has been given the sanction of authority. 

One feels the more compunction in attempting to pull down some 
of these traditional barriers to an enjoyment of modern art, be- 
cause it means doing away with much that people have come to love 
in the trusting belief that it is art. Let us consider separately and 
successively just those qualities in a painting which have been 
most esteemed, most loved, in the realistic illustrative era: intri- 
guing subject-matter, sentiment, perfect likeness, and technical 
dexterity. 

If one believes, as many of us do, that art is primarily a creative 
activity on the part of the artist, that it is one of the few ways in 
which divinity is constantly reasserting itself, that it has its own 
peculiar way of giving us pleasure, of bringing us to ecstasy, by 
the conveying of a definite esthetic emotion, then one must soon 
come to realize that the choice of subject-matter is of secondary 
importance. To picture the parting of lovers, the gray-haired pa- 
triot with the flag, the sweet babe, the wrecked ship in an angry sea, 
Diana’s chaste bath, death, marriage, etc., etc., is to add a literary 
element which simply has nothing to do with the fundamental prob- 
lem in hand. To ask a painting or statue to tell a story or convey 
a sentiment by association of ideas is a perversion of the function 
of those works of art. Subject-matter is somehow an inseparable 
part of the completed picture, and there must be a linking with 
life, but the heart of creative work really lies beyond subject-inter- 


est, beyond picturesqueness, sentiment and slices of life. 


TORSO, BY ARGHIPER RG 


It also lies beyond cleverness of transcription, beyond illusion. 
The photographic element, the factor that makes a picture beloved 
for its “perfect likeness,” is equally incidental. No doubt a paint- 
ing skilfully done can go farther than photography in getting a 
transcribed image; but if it does, it abandons its artistic function. 
The spectator admiring it for either its cleverness of exact imitation 


or for the conveyed natural beauty or charm or caressableness is 


10 


¥ 


simply using art to tickle some itchy spot in his emotional anatomy. 

As for the finish, the polish, so esteemed for several generations 
back, it simply came to be valued because it was not clear what was 
the real value of painting and sculpture if that wasn’t it. If a 
painting had no artistic depth, the painter might get by with a show 
of technical dexterity, a blinding virtuosity. The masculine brush- 
swinging of Sargent is no less of this sort than is the sweetly femi- 
nine tender brushing of a Bouguereau or a Leighton. 

These all are adventitious values—literary or dramatic subject- 
matter, photographic cleverness, technical display. They are ear- 
marks of a phase in art history, and it happens to be the least in- 
ventive, the least emotional, almost the dullest of all phases. 

There are those who, having discovered so much, urge that the 
contemporary artist should throw to the winds everything that has 
been gained in recent art practice, and so accomplish a return 
to the primitive or archaic—back to the well-springs where art flows 
pure and strong and unspoiled. A healthy thing it would be, too; 
getting the stuffy breath of the studio out of the lungs of their 
understanding, sniffing a bit of free urge to expression, getting the 
feel of creation. But not so fast, my child! That sort of regres- 
sion is—perhaps fortunately—impossible. The developing of a 
modern art, with the authentic universal art-appeal in it, and typical 
of these intense times, is not merely a matter of sailing away to 
savage isles. Gauguin gained much of freedom and something of 
fresh beauty in that way, and we all thank him for it. But his was 
hardly more than a little side-stream of the modern art current, 
which certainly could not develop impetus enough for a world 


movement; the other primitives of modernism are of a different 


11 


sort. We have come upon a fallacy here—the Primitive or Child- 
Art fallacy. 

It is futile indeed to talk of getting back to a simple primitivism. 
It is as illogical as trying to reconstruct the modern economic world 
without machinery. Industry has become a part of life, and the 
machine is indispensable to industry. The machine will enslave us 
only so long as most men have slave-minds. The enriched means 
of the modern painter create new opportunities for him, and the 
accumulated tradition of painting and sculpture constitutes a legacy 
through which the modern artist should arrive at a greater freedom 
and creative intensity. He merely has enslaved himself to photog- 
raphy and a set of bewhiskered rules. He needs badly the tonic 
of mental regression, to restore a primitive directness, a childlike 
surrender to the urge to create. But the painter gives up almost as 
much as he gains if he throws aside the means developed, particu- 
larly in color, in the last half-century. A true Primitive approach 
is an affectation today, and must be based on a withdrawal from 
life. And however much art departs from surface nature, art and 
life must remain inseparable. 

This is, of course, a matter of judgment. What I should like my 
readers to preserve as we proceed is a fine balance of open-minded- 
ness and judgment. It is entirely necessary to take off the blinders 
we were discussing a few pages back—the 19th Century blinders 
that narrowed the outlook into an unimportant and barren corner 
of the art field. In that escape lies open-mindedness. Judgment 
is a more difficult matter. Modern art, like every other new move- 
ment, gathers about itself a sad company of hangers-on, charlatans, 


and pickpockets, who merely capitalize its novelty, its “freedom,” 


12 


Pes CAPE WiTH STREAM, BY KISLING 


and finally its vogue. Having removed the blinders one needs to 
stand still and look about a bit, let the surroundings grow on one’s 
consciousness before moving. Primitivists, decadents, dadaists, 
are all about. But one will soon learn to recognize true modern 
artists too. 

As guide I can point out only one or two signposts that may 


make easier the approach from here on. One concerns the integ- 
13 


COS COB, BY GEORGIA O° RESP 


rity, the self-sufficiency of art. Whatever you are considering, re- 
member that art can only justify itself on its own account. If it is 
not worth while for itself, it is just as well to forget it. Don’t ask 
it to serve morals, or photography, or as a backscratcher to your 
memory and desire. Art brings emotions of its own kind, and these 
are not the emotions of objective beauty or the emotions of living. 


14 


If there is not something in it that speaks to us as fundamentally, 
as self-sufficiently, as religious experience or love, it is not worth 
all the bother mankind has made over it. 

Another signpost has to do with the medium. ‘There is a health- 
ful insistence among modernists that the peculiar pleasure afforded 
by any work of art is partly an outcome of the materials in which 
it is shaped and the artist’s inevitable way of handling those ma- 
terials. Don’t be seduced by a statue dressed up in the pretty 
sketchiness and lightness of painting. Don’t be misled into be- 
lieving that a painting is more profound because it tells all the 
details of an interesting story. Don’t think that the steel panelling 
in a modern railway coach is any the more “artistic” for being 
painted over with a grain imitating wood. A lot of people have 
got into the jungle by that road. 

And finally, let me not ever, ever, hear you say about anything 
you see in this book: “J could do something as good as that.” Be- 
lieve me, you couldn’t. You must respect the artist’s sincerity. To 
think that he doesn’t know any better than to draw so roughly is 
probably an indication that your sense of values is undeveloped 
after all. More people expose their ignorance with that remark 
than with any other conventional expression of irritation at the 
lack of comforting shallowness or caressability in modern art. 
I hope to suggest how it may be rough and hard, and careless of 
the more delicate graces, and still bring more of the eternal in, 
evoke more of ecstatic response, than your grandmother’s portrait 
done by Sir John Lavery or Rodin’s ingratiating group The Kiss. 
The modernist is fundamentally concerned with esthetic problems, 


and willingly lets those surface values go by. 


15 


He may, of course, add delicacy and “finish” too; but he does 
not make those qualities the reason for his painting, sculpture or 
drawing. Don’t make the mistake of judging a thing as modern- 
istic just because it is rough. Delicate, sensitive line, for instance, 
is of the very essence of the medium of etching. But there, as 
everywhere in the realm we are entering, there must be esthetic 


form beyond the surface. 


\ 


, 
x 


\ 


Ny 
. 


MY 


FROM AN ETCHING, BY EDWIN SOARS 


II 


THE HISTORICAL 
BACKGROUND 


Migeoey rae 6 


aie: § 


¢$ * all) 
i! 
“ . 
+ tps 
ae 
ae 
« 
s 
¥ 
> 
7 


fete ANCE, BY MAT ISOs EB 


EN like Paul Cezanne, Oskar Kokoschka, Henri Matisse, 

and in America John Marin and Walt Kuhn—the men who 
make art history—more often than not die while still officially neg- 
lected, although a small company of people who judge by their 
emotions only are likely to appreciate and buy their works. (Emo- 
tional people, alas, have so little money!) The museums and 
academies, of course, are notoriously concerned with the dead 
past and the living echoes of that past. Even the speeding-up 
process of modern machine civilization—Gauguin, I believe, al- 
ways spat when he pronounced the word—has not served to bring 
them closer to the living present. But the tragic part is that art 


appreciation in general is swayed by those institutions. The agen- 


19 


cies which should be closer to life, the schools, colleges, clubs, 
manufacturers, lecturers, and picture-buyers in general, are super- 
stitiously servile to the judgments of those in authority; and the 
journalists, living first of all to meet the best-seller demand, either 
echo these others or revert to illustration—or, in rare cases, notice 
the modernist to crucify him with their wit. In general, the Past 
rules, a code of recognized practice obtains, and divergence in the 
direction of creative effort is disciplined. 

It is little wonder, then, if the man who breaks through the bul- 


9 


wark thrown up by “authority,” intoxicated a little by the beauty 
he has found in the forbidden territory, develops a huge contempt 
for the whole cultural edifice of the modern world. His contempt 
is likely to extend to history—as if history and not the men who 
codified it were to blame. But if it was true that we failed to wel- 
come Cezanne because we judged by a narrow standard developed | 
out of what had been, it is also true that we have to go farther back 
into history to find his reasons for being; and it is likely that we 
can best come to full appreciation by understanding the whole story 
of painting, and the blind paths into which it has blundered at 
times. This is not a suggestion that historical sanction should 
qualify our appreciation, but only an intimation that a little per- 
spective never hurt anybody. Besides, most people’s prejudices 
about modern art have arisen out of distorted history. 

Specifically, the world has been judging the art of today— 
bustling, intense, shrill, energetic, dynamic today—by the standard 
of the quiet over-refined art of Greece’s almost decadent period, 
by the art of sweet Raphael, by the art of the sophisticated, ease- 


taking, profligate Courts of France. We Americans, even, have been 


20 


busy judging our period of youth, of birth, struggle, upheaval, of 
crude but pushing effort, perhaps of new heroic victories, by the 
refinements of a smoothed-out civilization, by the delicate orna- 
ments, frills and excrescences produced and fit for the fancies of a 
king’s mistress. 

The fallacy of establishing these periods as criteria is not to be 
laid wholly to any arbitrary academy or authority. The structure 
of modern culture was built in the image of modern capitalistic 
civilization. Our art museums are no less dependent on the bounty 
of Capital than they once were on the bounty of kings. An ease- 
loving class at the top, with below it a cushion in a Bourgeoisie that 
sought only a fair measure of comfort, created the cultural stand- 
ards and authorities—and these in turn decreed comforting art: 
Greek refinement, delicate ornamental court painting, safe, sane, 
cultured art. The art of the last hundred years, except where pho- 
tographic naturalism mushroomed out into the slums, has well 
served its leisure-class patrons in that respect. Art has all but 
died of good taste. 

The modernist, seeking to get to the soul of his art, is no less im- 
patient of these standards of good taste out of history than he is 
of the photographic and sentimental limitations demanded by the 
magazine-reading Bourgeoisie. He thinks he sees a new world era 
dawning politically and economically. He knows that art should 
be breaking new ground. It can no more stand still or repeat than 
can religion. He approaches history scornfully—and what he 
finds is sanction for his own insurgency. 

For he sees that it is chosen periods that are set up statically in 


the schoolbooks and museums as models. What is history, if not 


1 


a record of change? Then he notes that the much-touted art pe- 
riods usually correspond to the settled-down or decadent periods in 
the lives of the nations they represent. When the Greeks are stud- 
ied, it is the high Greeks, not the early, inventive, creative Greeks, 
with the marks of creation on them. It is rather “the perfect 
Greeks”: the sculptor who has become so clever that he can get in 
stone a perfect polished imitation of an athlete, disguising the stone 
quality, attaining to a certain pictorial beauty—but by no means so 
expressively, so emotionally, as the artists of the formative period. 
The modernist looks into the schoolbooks to find sculpture before 
Phidias practically ignored, its vigorous expressiveness discounted 
because the realistic touch and pleasing polish are lacking; while 
pretty things like Praxiteles’ Hermes are known to every grammar 
school pupil. He feels that the time in which this nobly simple 
Horse was produced, is nearer the high point of creative power 
among the Greeks than was the late 4th Century and early 
3rd Century of Praxiteles. He sees the Renaissance generally 
revered for its warmed-over Classicism. Raphael, with his sweet 
purity, becomes the world’s standard of perfect painting, and all 
the fellows after Raphael are praised to the exclusion of the 
stronger, if often cruder pre-Raphaelites. (The so-called Pre-Ra- 
phaelite School in England recognized that fallacy—in theory—but 
continued to paint within the refinements and limitations of con- 
temporary English taste, took the surface characteristics but caught 
neither the spirit nor the freedom of the earlier time.) 

Along with these polished Greeks and reasonable Renaissance 
Italians, the modernists would bracket the French Court Painters 


and their prettified English fellows—Gainsborough, et. al—as es- 


22 


HORSE—-EARLY 
GREEK SCULPTURE 


teemed far above their due. They further deny any creative value 
in Roman art—vulgar, showy, realistic! They feel that for 400 
years there has hardly been anything more creative than colored 
photography. The Dutch genre painters? My, my! As bad as 
Greuze or Bouguereau. 

The history of art as seen by this new generation of seekers, 
would outline about like this: 

In the beginnings of Western art, say from the period of the 
reindeer-hunters, there are works of marked esthetic sensibility. 
Man is not yet much troubled by intellect. An instinctive groping 
for some elementary symmetry leads first to rude sculpture and the 
shaping of vessels or weapons. There follow drawing (or scratch- 
ing), and wall painting, usually with an admirable emotional di- 
rectness. There were, to be sure, periods of realistic pursuit even 


in these prehistoric times, just as the imitative art of some savage 


23 


CAVE DRAWING 


peoples of today puts them on a level as low as, for instance, the _ 
sculptors of our average academy exhibitions. But in general the 
European primitive peoples stand high in artistic creativeness. 
Somewhat comparable to them are certain still-existent “backward” 
peoples. African negro carving at its naive best is an example, 
and the one most in public notice at the moment. The modernists 
are beginning to grant that even too much importance may have 
been read into negro art, simply for its negative value as being 
unrealistic. But in general, primitive art is highly esteemed as 
being emotionally expressive. 

If the art of the reindeer-hunter was, in its representative ele- 
ment, simple, immediate, limited almost exclusively to the animals 
which were so much a part of his everyday life, the art of Egypt 
was no less restricted by the life of the people on the Nile. A pow- 
erful priesthood, mystery, fear, have left their mark on the gen- 
erally servile artists of that larger half of known human history 


which is almost exclusively concerned with Egypt. But occasionally 


24 


a generation of sculptors, given unwonted freedom, escaped mere 
perfected craftsmanship and stereotyped conventionalization to 
gain a finely solid expressiveness, achieving works that rank with 
the world’s finest, as in the Theban and Saite periods. 

Chaldza and Babylon have left some few creative works, al- 
though the examples extant indicate no such surety of feeling as 
was evident in the best periods elsewhere; and Assyrian art be- 
queathes us hardly more than interesting realistic records of the 
cruelty of contemporary life. 

Greek art is free from the mystery of Egyptian, and for long 
free of Assyrian realism. At first it is emotional, then intellectual 
—hbut always there is an element of clearness about it. The finely 
primitive things from Crete and Mycene—primitive in the best 
sense, strong, expressive—were followed by the heavy and archi- 
tectonic works of the Dorians, and these again by the more feminine 


Ionians. After these periods, all richly creative, the strains fused 


DRAWING BY PiCASSO 


25 


to flow beautifully in Attic art—but the fusion itself held the seeds 
of decay, and Phidias is a leader when the decline has already 
started. Polish becomes a first objective, the approach becomes 
over-intellectual, works of art are esteemed for being true, pretty, 
sane. The doctrine of “Perfection” of which the Greeks became 
enamored, is dangerous to freedom of emotion, to human instincts, 
and finally to living beauty. It is this doctrine that animates the 
sculptors and architects almost throughout the periods usually 
glorified—at any rate, from the time of the building of the Parthe- 
non. Art becomes pictorial, imitative, unemotional, reasonable. 
Starkly creative things are no longer valued. 

Rome—except when one counts in the Etruscan contribution—is 
uncreative throughout her history, imperialistic, materialistic. The 
Romans build on slavery, love magnificence, lose the spirit. They 
get nothing out of their country, from their own hearts; they im- 
port Greek artists, then imitate Greek art, for their comfort. | Shal- 
low show of art! 

Christianity recovers the spirit of man. Emotion rises true 
again. So far as art is concerned, there is fumbling at first. After 
five or six centuries there is a flowering in the Byzantine of Eastern 
Christendom, which spreads Westward with individual works and 
with a general sensuous enrichment. As for the next development, 
Romanesque leading into Gothic, there has been an almost 
iconoclastic shifting of valuations by the modernists. They find 
“high” Gothic decadent, the spirit run out, the shell only surviving 
and getting itself over-decorated. The real art of the Middle Ages 
is in the stronger, serener, more honest Romanesque, and, at latest, 


in 13th Century Gothic. The later Gothic sculpture particularly, 


26 


in its concession to realism, is infinitely inferior to the earlier, 
cruder but more expressive works. 

Architecture is supposed by the moderns to have died with the 
coming of the Renaissance. Its last flicker was, perhaps, in the 
Florentine palaces, combining in a new synthesis Medieval, Roman 
and purely local elements. From that time architecture is eclectic, 
unoriginal, tame, concerned almost entirely with modes of surface 
decoration—with facades. Post-Gothic sculpture also is pretty 
rather than moving, except in the authentic giant Michael Angelo. 

Painting comes to its decadence later than these others. The 
“Primitives” and pre-Raphaelites in general are animated by a 
search for something formal or at least sensuous. Giotto, of all 
the “well-known” painters, is first claimed by the modernists as 
kin, and with him a considerable group of his immediate prede- 
cessors. After him, the decline, the true Classical Renaissance 
painters, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo, the sweet Raphael, and all 
the also-rans of the schoolbooks. 

Modernism, I believe, accepts Rembrandt in his most expressive 
moments (remember the Old Woman Paring Her Nails at the 
Metropolitan Museum) ; it finds evidences of form-seeking in Tin- 
toretto; it grants that Rubens had the quality but in a showy ex- 
travagant way. Its one great god out of the period from Giotto to 
Cezanne is El Greco (Theotokopulos). How far this discipleship 
marks a reversal of accepted academic opinion may be judged 
from one instance: our most circulated history of art (in England 
and France as well as America, I believe), the Apollo of Reinach, 
illustrates no less than nineteen works of Raphael, whereas El 


Greco not only goes unillustrated but is not even mentioned in the 


27 


AGONY IN THE GARDEN, BY?) Ble 


book. Every school dictionary lists such illustrators as Correggio 
and Murillo, but El Greco is among those absent. And yet in the 
annals of world painting as compiled by the artists of today, El 
Greco’s name leads all the rest. The reason lies in his emphasis 
on form, his seeking for an expressive esthetic quality even at the 
expense of naturalness—a quality to be much talked about in com- 
ing chapters. I am adding here a reproduction from El Greco, op- 
posite a typical modernist work, to suggest certain obvious parallels. 

For the rest, there are conceded to be scattered painters of emo- 
tionally expressive achievement after the Renaissance, but no 


giants. And usually the “recognized” artists are littke more than 


28 


Monee tO RT RATT, BY KOKROSCHKEKA 


competent illustrators. In German art, appreciation begins to 
shift from Diirer and Holbein to Cranach and Baldung; and there 
is not an important post-Renaissance figure until Hans von Marées, 
Germany’s only important 19th Century painter. The modernists 
entirely overlook English art, except for a passing mention of Con- 
stable and Turner as an impetus to seeking for color-form. French 
art is dull or brilliant illustration through most of its history—very 
fine technically but very little expressive; although Poussin comes 
in for deserved appreciation. Those who grant to the “decora- 
tive’ movement a certain validity as a part of modernism, still 


find a good deal to praise and enjoy in Puvis de Chavannes; and 


29 


Daumier has gained considerably in stature by reason of his being 
clearly a forerunner of the present-day emotional-organizational 
painting. But Cezanne is really the first epochal figure since El 
Greco. The three centuries between, with these few minor excep- 
tions, have been given over to descriptive painting and sculpture, 
and imitative architecture. Realism, truth to nature, cramped the 
vision of the artist, and there were merely minor pendulum-swings 
to idealistic or naturalistic treatment, to added romantic or stylistic 
or classic rhetoric. Intellectualism rules; critics confound the spec- 
tator with facts; the world becomes too curious about externals, 
bashful about its own emotions. 

In this summary, modernist-fashion, I have hit only the high 
spots of history as I think the average “radical” artist sees it. 
There would be acrid debates over many of the names mentioned 
if one brought them up in any studio; I have not even pleased my 
own preferences; I have merely attempted a rough-hewn cross-sec- 
tion of opinion. But of this much I am sure: some such rewriting 
of history is becoming necessary as the world gradually accepts 
Cezanne’s achievement as a turning-point in art development, as it 
becomes apparent that for hundreds of years photography has been 
a false god among painters and sculptors. Many old idols are due 
fomactall. 

The reader, then, wiil do well to forget most of what he was 
taught out of the schoolbooks. He will do well to remember three 
points: First, there are no absolute standards in art, neither rules 
for creation nor tests that will serve for all peoples and all times— 
and particularly no authorities who can arrange artists in hierarch- 


ies that will stand the tests of newly creative eras. Second, the 


30 


modernist believes that, esthetically, we are at the breaking of a 
new era, that in it we are returning to emotional expressiveness as a 
fundamental—with perhaps a special intensity growing out of mod- 
ern life. And third, there have been artists in history, some little 
recognized during the realistic centuries, others famous, who have 
had that peculiarly expressive quality. There have been, most not- 
ably, the primitives, the archaic Greeks, the Romanesque and early 
Gothic builders and sculptors, certain Orientals (of whom I have 
said nothing, of course, in this summary of Western art), Giotto, 
Tintoretto, and—most important of modern “discoveries”—El 
Greco. If one must find in history a background for the modernist 


movement, these are the artists to study. 


a 
A 


£ 


v 


“ay 


Bay oeD AY. De 2B UR DUK 


t 
4 


> as. 


Cael 


JRLEL 


THE THEORETICAL 
BACKGROUND 


LOWER MANHATTAN, BY JOHN MARIN 


HIS picture seems to me to have quite obviously the quality 
-L that‘is the essence of modern creative painting. No individ- 
ually creative work, of course, can elucidate a complete set theory; 
but something implicit here brings us face to face with the ques- 
tions which we must meet sooner or later: what is the essential 
mark, the zsthetic warrant, of the modernist movement as distin- 
guished from preceding developments? If the imitative element 


and the element of surface prettiness are only subordinate, what is 


35 


it that really constitutes the heart of the visual arts? If it is a 
quality that can in a sense be isolated and recognized, is it univer- 
sal, applicable to the true art of all time—or substantially modern? 

It has been remarked often that one requires no knowledge of 
either history or theory to come to an enjoyment of music. At the 
present moment we are in no such fortunate position as regards 
the visual arts. We are bigoted. Due partly to the popular con- 
fusion of art with purely illustrative activity, and partly to mis- 
education regarding the fundamentals, one must dip into theory, 
as into history, to dislodge certain widely-held misconceptions. The 
Average Man has, in a very true sense, lost the power to judge for 
himself. When he trusted to his emotions—and that is what he 
does with music—he found himself in opposition to art “authority.” 
Then when his emotional reactions were trained out of him, he had 
to take someone’s else’s word for it that what he looked at was art. 
A whole false structure of associative values—photographic like- 
ness, moral truth, slick technique, symbolism, etc.—was formed 
for him. He must go deep enough into theory to find something in 
John Marin’s painting above, which will take the place of those 
qualities of likeness, sentiment, prettiness and “meaning” which 
are obviously lacking in most paintings “‘since realism.” 

In brief statement, the theory that specially applies to the bulk 
of modernist achievement and experiment in painting, sculpture and 
the graphic arts may be put about like this: Art is an activity, in- 
extricably bound up with life but only incidentally concerned with 
the surface aspects of nature, with an emotional realm of its own, 
concerned with expression rather than representation, with creation 


rather than imitation, and characterized in each separate work by 


36 


a particular and essential quality in the nature of emotionally 
expressive form—a quality which can be intensified today as never 
before, through enriched means and as a reflection of the intensity 
of contemporary life. 

The core of any absolute statement of modern art theory is in 
the inclusion of the one word “form.” It is that which we must in. 
vestigate further if we would understand what all the true post- 
Impressionists are after, and why they consider 19th Century art 
generally futile, feeble and gutless. 

When you listen to music you experience an emotion—reaching 
the point of ecstasy at times—which is entirely dissociated from 
the ordinary emotions of living. When you look at a noble build- 
ing you experience a pleasure different in kind from that arising 
from contemplation of a naturally beautiful landscape. When you 
look at a painting or statue which is characterized by artistic form 
and not merely by objective likeness and technical virtuosity, you 
experience a reaction different from that afforded by a woman’s 
pretty face or a beautiful body or a child among flowers. The 
beauty of the landscape may be very real to you, may seem to free 
you more than the work of art; and the woman’s face or body may 
have a more intimate appeal, and the child a more caressable qual- 
ity; but however pleasurable, it is not an artistic emotion which you 
feel from these things. You may even discover a “picturesque”’ 
value in them and say, “That is as beautiful as a picture’-—but you 
will only confuse your mind if you confound the pleasure received 
from them with the one determining and essential quality of a 
painting or statue. Indeed, one of the best kindergarten tests I 


know for a work of art is the question: “Is it merely picturesque, 


37 


or has it esthetic value of its own?” For, although the artist 
may be driven to creation by something he has divined in the 
woman or the landscape or the child, it is what he puts into the 
work that makes it art. 

It is entirely necessary to get clear this distinction between the 
beauty of things living and the beauty created by artists. The 
beauty of things born, of nature, arouses our admiration in many 
ways, usually with a mingled emotion of wonder, pleased senses, 
desire. Art strikes straight to some separate esthetic inner being, 
something as close to the spirit of man as it is possible to penetrate. 
To me this seems as fundamental an approach to the spirit, to dis- 
embodied spirituality, as those other two unexplainable highroads, 
love and religious experience. I will not venture here any specu- 
lation as to how close together or how distinct these three phenomena 
may be; I feel, however, that no man has lived his spiritual life to 
the full if he has not experienced widely of all three. Atsthetic 
emotion, arising from something which an artist has endowed with 
form, whether music, architecture or painting, is of that order, 
moves mankind thus fundamentally. The sensations arising from 
contemplation of a landscape or a butterfly or a flower are related 
to a different order of experience, closer to the physical senses. 
The beauty of a human face or body, to be sure, may be so bound 
up with love and with revelation of character and vaguely with 
desire that one cannot put physical or spiritual boundaries to it. 
But either way it fails to touch the esthetic emotions. 

Not only is the realm of art thus distinct from the realm of nat- 
ural beauty, but nothing could be more disastrous to the artist than 


to try primarily to transfer the beauty of the one sort into his crea- 


38 


tions of the other sort. If it is the flower’s natural appeal that he 
is carrying over with his art materials, there will be small place for 
creative form. Natural beauty is only a starting-point for the ar- 
tist’s emotion, and something naturally “ugly” or nondescript is 
as likely to serve. (I am adding here an illustration of Leighton’s 
The Bath of Psyche, which is one of the best examples I know of 
transcribed beauty. All the thousand tendernesses of a woman’s 
body are lovingly conveyed in the exquisite modelling and softly 
sensuous coloring. Such a picture is a thing to be desired—one 
would love to have it about; but it is beautiful emotional photogra- 
phy, not emotional art.) 

Artistic “form,” which, as nearly as blundering words can iden- 
tify it, is the quality characterizing each particular work of art, the 
quality evoking esthetic emotion in the spectator, varies in many 
ways: with the material of the art under consideration, with the 
intensity of the emotion felt and expressed by the artist, with the 
extent of abandonment to subjective emotion, with the degree of 
his naiveté or sophistication. It also varies in name, from the 
“rhythmic vitality, or spiritual rhythm expressed in the movement 
of life” of the Chinese Six Canons of painting, to the “spatial ex- 
istence’ and “voluminous form” of two recent American critics. 
The clearest elementary treatise about it is to be found in an admi- 
rable little book entitled Art, by Clive Bell. He calls it (in rela- 
tion to the visual arts) significant form; and his phrase has afforded 
a multitude of people a handy label for something they had before 
mentioned gropingly and even bashfully, because it seemed myste- 
rious and nameless. Bell brings out clearly how this “significant 


form” endows with living zsthetic values every moving work of 


39 


THE BATH, “OF BSYCHE 


EIGHTON 


Be 


40 


art from the primitives to the post-Impressionists. Despite the 
dangers in such a catch-phrase, it is so serviceable that I shall use 
it often, although I shall begin later to phrase it expressive form, 
because that seems to me a closer indication of the modernists’ 
particular goal, linking up with much that I shall have to say about 
Expressionism. First, however, it is necessary to inquire briefly 
into the artist’s way of creation: how he comes to expression, and 
more particularly what are the elements giving rise to or shaping 
or dictating the form. 

We may (arbitrarily) note three elements in the making of a 
picture or statue, after that unexplainable eruption of creative 
energy which we term inspiration. 

First of these elements is something in the nature of subject- 
matter, the objective element in nature or in memory or in imagina- 
tion; second, the subjective element, the artist’s emotion playing 
around the object, choosing it, shaping it, distorting it, submitting 
it to some abstract permutation—the experiencing element; and 
third, the element of material and methods, the paint-quality or 
sculpture-quality which more or less shapes, and is more or less 
intensified in, each separate work. 

The objective element, as we have seen, all but rode art to death 
in the period just drawing to a close. Not only did it enter into 
the making of a work of art, but any distortion of the outward 
aspect of the object was decreed to be a violation of Truth. (El 
Greco was explained away on the grounds of defective vision! 
Cezanne was astigmatic!) The modernists react violently from 
such deification of subject. Objective nature becomes merely a 


starting-point and not the end-and-all of art. In place of the old 


41 


search for pretty models and picturesque sketching grounds, there 
was at the first breaking of the new force a monotonous deluge of 
the familiar and the unpretentious. We were flooded with apples, 
table-cloths and salt-shakers, just to prove that picturesqueness 
didn’t count, that any subject-matter would serve. Some artists, 
to be sure, denied objective values entirely, painted abstractly; al- 
though it is not clear to some of us that they did not substitute some 
different order of subject-meanings, symbolic or psychic, for what 
they abandoned. Others, the Cubists, devaluated reality by dis- 
assembling the planes of nature and reassembling them according 
to an esthetically-felt need. All these artists came to believe that 
as long as natural truth enslaved them there was little chance to 
come at something they felt vaguely as form. 

There has been, indeed, an easily traceable progression toward 
the abstract, away from objective interest, ever since Cezanne dis- 
torted the vision of Impressionism to gain what he called greater 
“realization.” But there is almost general agreement that abstrac- 
lion, except in the case of a “time art” like mobile color or music, 
is a will-o’-the wisp in the arts. Some anchor must be maintained 
in objectivity, in life as experienced. To be sure, increased em- 
phasis on the inner structural essence of the subject, increased 
formal significance, increased respect for the demands of the ma- 
terial, whether stone, paint-and-canvas or paper-and-ink, have all 
but done away with surface-aspect—but the object does somehow 
survive. 

In so far as the modern artist takes heed of the object for its own 
sake, it may be said that he does so to discover in it some deeper 


significance, some structural over-value, an essential quality quite 


42 


PaGi hy Dye FRANZ MIA RC 


different (at times) from its outward one-view aspect. Someone 
has said that when Franz Marc painted a tiger, he painted the 
“tiger quality,” tigerishness, the emotion raised by tiger. How far 
this is an absolute quality in the tiger, with universal emotional sig- 
nificance, and how far it is subjective with the artist, we need not 
inquire here. But the example at least helps to define the new 
approach to subject, the search for deeper expressive values in 
the object than the accidental ones seen on the surface. 

The second element, the artist’s emotion, is of course the major 
factor. It differs from other people’s emotion (on seeing the same 
object) in combining a more profound sensibility with an instinc- 
tive impulse to artistic creation. His special sensitiveness, which 
makes him divine the inner tigerish essence—feel the tiger—rather 
than merely see the animal photographically, is matched by an 
emotional impulse to express himself, as affected by that quality, 
in form. 


It would be wholly futile to inquire, in a Primer, whether the 


43 


SCRIABIN, BY ZALKALNS 


important point in creation is reached in the artist’s emotional 
process or in his catching of the form-quality in paint or stone; 
whether the emotion shapes inevitably the crystallization, or the 
“feel for form” directs the emotion. Until the exstheticians and 
psycho-analysts have dug deeper, we are only sure that the form- 
problem is much more closely bound up with the artist's emotion 
than it is with objective nature. We may be sure, however, that 
his leaping forward to a vision of the final artistic form, the crea- 
tion of an “image” is spontaneous rather than reasoned. 
Kandinsky, chief modern seeker for the abstract in painting, 
identifies the soul with the source of artistic creation, and claims 
to get his materials out of an originating “spiritual harmony”; 


but he more often than not brings recognizable objects into his can- 


44 


vases somewhere, and the fact that he fishes these out of his sub- 
conscious self and not directly from nature, is not a proof of spir- 
itual origin. His purely abstract paintings, moreover, lack in 
general just that formal significance which we believe to charac- 
terize the most moving works of art. 

In short, the form-problem as the objective and subjective ele- ; 
ments enter into it, can be stated something like this: The artist 
sees objective forms in nature; due to his special sensibility, and in 
the grasp of his emotion they become, so to speak, forms subjec- 
tive; they then go through a filter of abstraction (his sense of abso- 
lute esthetic form); and in the final expression they retain more 
or less of the original object as emotionally felt, but it is the reve; 
lation of the abstract quality that counts most. | 

The third element influencing the artist’s conception of form, 
and helping to shape the crystallization, is that which grows out of 
the nature of his materials. For it is true that a part of the modern- 
ist’s struggle for greater expressiveness has been concerned with 
the attainment of some peculiar virtue arising from the materials 
of his art. Modern sculpture (post-Rodin sculpture) especially is 
marked by the attempt to grasp an essentially sculptural massive- 
ness dictated by the heaviness of stone or metal and its resistance 
to the tool; and progressive architects are trying to shatter their 
profession’s obsession with the designing of facades, in favor of a 
return to the fundamental problems of building in modern mate- 
rials. Charles Marriott recently wrote, in commenting on Clive 
Bell’s theory of form: “TI am inclined to believe that ‘significant 
form’ is nothing other than form in which the record of vision’ is 


ct A 
felt to be compatible with free and characteristic movement of the 


45 


BATHERS, BY “COURB ES 


human hand in or with the particular medium employed.” That 
seems like a shallow evasion of the deeper problems involved in a 
theory of form, but it serves to indicate how far material has been 
) recently studied for its special sort of expressiveness. The current 
toward subjective presentation has been paralleled by a current 
toward purification and intensification of means. 

In thinking of form as a quality in art, then, it is well to keep 
“in mind the three things from which we have been unable to dis- 
sociate it, from which indeed it is probably inseparable: first, the 
anchor in objectivity, the emotion of reality; second, the subjective 


process, the creative emotion of the artist, working through an ab- 


46 


Dai ews woes) 6 6CCEL ZAIN NE 


stract conception; third, the expressiveness of materials. I do not 
mean that you should think of these things when looking at any 
specific work of art—that would be ruinous; indeed, I begin to 
think that when you have got some sort of glimmer of the place 
of each of these elements, you should forget them all and go look 
at some modern paintings or sculptures. If you find expressive 
form speaking to you, as against subject-matter, that is all. that 
counts. Analysis is only worth while as a part of forgotten ex- 
perience. ¥ 
The two Meet ions on these two pages are placed together as 


an object lesson. Courbet’s Bathers is typical naturalistic art at its 


47 


best; Cezanne’s Bathers is typical of the modern return to form- 
seeking. The difference involved in the comparison may be sum- 
marized as expression vs. representation; creation vs. description; 
form vs. aspect. In so far as nature survives in the Cezanne canvas 
it is not as the casual eye sees it, but as natural objects affect the 
creative emotion of the artist. That is the essential distinction— 
the boundary between realistic and modernistic art. 

Why this distinction marks a true revolution in the realm of 
esthetics should be clear when we reflect that, despite waverings 
between idealistic and naturalistic treatment (compare the Courbet 
and Leighton pictures), between classic and romantic escapes from 
familiar things, the whole normal development of art for approxi- 
mately 400 years has been limited by the imitation-of-nature canon. 
Expression in form as understood by practically all the modernists 
—whether emphasizing more the emotion of the subject, the artist’s 
emotion, or material essence—is the very opposite of 16th-17th- 
18th-19th Century illustrative painting and sculpture and—in a 
slightly different way—imitative architecture. 

An understanding of this shift in the approach to art (not merely 
in means or treatment) enables one to clarify the way by turning 
r aside certain currents which have served to muddy the stream of 

e ‘modern art theory. These currents are symbolism, mysticism and 
) “yomanticism. When one speaks of getting away from realism, 
1 -sdinéone is bound to mention one of these other isms as an alterna- 
| tive; but they really have nothing to do with the case. 

Symbolism is, in baldest statement, the placing of one object or 
idea to suggest another. It is properly a subdivision of imitative 


art, because it deals with objective nature. The fact that it works 


48 


by analogy or association of ideas fails to bring it within the field 
of emotionally expressive art. It is, rather, an intellectual ten- 
dency, baiting the spectator’s mind with double entendre and with 
the aptness of one concept implying another. This is not a means 
to intensification but a sort of intellectual jugglery, on the material 
plane. 

If mysticism is the constant struggle to pierce behind those veils 
that hide us into the petty world as it accidentally is, then the new 
art cannot get along without mysticism; but the new slope does not 
lie in the direction of that generally-accepted mysticism that plays 
prettily with the veils that hide the heart of life. We have had 
enough of high priests and mystagogues, and of dimness for its 
own sake. 

Romanticism is at the far pole from modernist endeavor because 
it is based on a purely objective vision of a realm imagined from 
outward experience, much as Heaven is imagined with harps and 
streets of gold. The romantic artist merely takes the spectator away 
from life into a world of sentimental adventure—a weak escape 
from living. He ordinarily deals nine-tenths in glamour, bombast 


and sentimentalism. 


The art of today lies rather in the direction of a more abstract » 


means, of stark expression, not with symbols or illusory veils-or lie 


pretty excursions, but with emotional reality intensified and crys: 
&. 


ee, 


tallized in formal expression. yh der’ aN 

It is well, I opine, to add a word about realism andenaittaliont 
and particularly some explanation of my use of the terms in this 
book. Broadly, I have adopted “realism” as a blanket name for 


the sort of visual art where emphasis is on correct representation— 


49 


oth 


BATHERS, BY OTTO MUELLER 


thus including practically all phases that are not essentially form- 
seeking. When I speak specifically of the “Realists,” however, I 
have in mind those unrelentingly literal painters from Courbet to 
Sargent, who correspond to the Zolas and Tolstoys of fiction and the 
slice-of-life dramatists. Impressionism was a special aspect-of-the- 
moment sort of realism. And Naturalism, specifically, was that 
vicious phase which boldly and frankly existed for the clever me- 
ticulous transcription of nature, for illustration with detail deified. 


-. Distortion is rife in modern art. Some of it is wilful, unneces- 


‘sary and unjustified by any esthetic gain. The timid and scan- 


dalized academically-trained Average Citizen has a right, perhaps, 
to ask what all the shootin’s for if no new bird is brought to ground. 
But the artist’s right to a deviation from natural aspects is more 


than justified if he realizes some deeper formal value such as that 


50 


existent typically in Cezanne’s mature work—as in his lady Bathers 
a few pages back and in his gentlemen Bathers a page or two for- 
ward. The German Expressionists, interpreting Cezanne’s aim as 
something strongly structural, go even farther in arbitrary treat- 
ment of nature—as in Otto Mueller’s Bathers. 

“Distortion” is, of course, a purely comparative word outside 
the field cf mathematical science. All art that has subject-matter 
is distorted if judged by photography. What we really mean in 
applying the term to modern art is that the artist has been so in- 
tent upon some purely emotional or artistic problem that he has 
shoved likeness to nature into a secondary place, being careless of 
her or twisting her aspects to such an,extent that the eye looking 
for likeness is shocked. 

Those who are so shocked—and academic critics are bound to 
be, at first—put forward various excuses for distortion as prac- 
tised by scattered great artists throughout history: the Primitives 
in general were lacking in sensibility and had imperfect control over 
their materials; El Greco suffered from defective vision; a very 
few, like Michael Angelo, must be excused because genius is above 
ordinary rules. But the modernist simply topples over the whole 


structure by saying that if art is to be an activity worth while on: 


its own account, its manifestations should be judged solely from’ nes 


the standpoint of artistic (not photographic) loss or gain; and that © 
the eye artistically trained will unconsciously leap the barrier’ ie 
distortion. It is being so proven every day, as people who sean 
laughed at what they called “crazy art” come over into the field of 
appreciation of Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Kandinsky and their 


fellows. The discords of the previous century become the mate- 


51 


rials for this century’s music. More people constantly turn to en- 
joyment of primitive and archaic sculpture as against that of the 
“finished” periods. And appreciation of El Greco grows while pho- 
tographically expert and sweet painters like Murillo, del Sarto and 
even Raphael tend to recede to a respected historical desuetude. 
Even William Blake comes in for a belated vogue in England. 

It is no argument, perhaps, but a significant coincidence that the 
seekers for a living formal quality in painting and sculpture seem 
to detect it most easily in those very artists whose distorted vision 
the academicians seek to excuse. But let us inquire into the quality 
of distortion only as it is evident in the work of Paul Cezanne. His 
paintings clearly achieve expressive form in the fourth-dimensional 
sense. Beyond the three dimensions of length, breadth and perspec- 
tive depth, there is a rhythm, voluminous movement, or a poised 
spatial relationship that speaks emotionally to the spectator. In a 
great many of his canvases one seems to detect a fluctuating of the 
volumes and planes, a palpable feeling of emotional organization. 
This roll within the canvas is the most evident visual sign in a room- 
ful of modern paintings. 

The physical phase of Cezanne’s distortion can be detected in 
the way in which objective bodies or planes are bent backward or 
forward at the point of meeting, as if leaning to each other in a 
profounder contrapuntal design. Accidentals of nature are bent 
tc advance or recede in accordance with the demands of abstract 
spatial organization. There is no other explanation than that Ce- 
zanne has deliberately (or instinctively) deformed nature for zs- 
thetic purposes, distorted aspect for the sake of poising abstract 
form in his canvases. Since physically it is largely light (color) 
52 we. 


BaryrHERS, BY CEZANNE 


with which he hangs up, so to speak, this deeper rhythm, I must 
ask the reader here to search out and study an original Cezanne 
painting. 

We need pause only a moment over that arbitrary sort of distor- 
tion practised by the psychic Expressionists, the deviation from nat- 
ural truth in order that objects or symbols of cryptic meaning may 
be belched up out of the artist’s subconscious and substituted for 
immediate outward aspects. That is a return to the objective basis, 
and it usually takes the form of neurotic idea-transference, making 
art a sort of chimney for soul-distress. But distortion of natural 


forms for gain.in emotional intensity we must countenance. 


Next to distortion, crudity. The academicians are appalled at 
the lack of refinement in modern art. Need one take the trouble, 
in this age of scientifically terrible wars, million-volt discharges, 
steel and concrete, to say that table manners are well enough in 
their way, but hardly at the heart of progress? Repeatedly art has 
died of polish, to be reborn to glory with the effort-marks of crea- 
tion on it. Perfection of finish is practically never a mark of the 
great periods. Our pretty public library buildings and our slick 
pseudo-Greek-temple banks are only too eloquent of the refined 
culture of the architects who built them—knowing everything about 
design and ornament, and nothing of the romantic and exciting 
art of building. One longs for the mark of a tool or a gaunt stretch 
of wall in their buildings, for a building that above all else builds. 
If the deeper creative harmony is there, seeming surface crudity is 
not going to hurt either painting or architecture—or any work in 
any art. 

One word more about the quality form. It is not always under- 
stood, even among adherents of modernism, to mean that moving, 
voluminous, fluctuating, fourth-dimensional thing that is detectable 
in a painting by Cezanne or Kokoschka or Marin. That, I should 
say, is the most generally accepted interpretation. But another 
view is that compositional organization even in a surface sense, as 
in the decorative painting of Gauguin, is an achievement of signifi- 
cant form. Here it is linear rather than surface organization, a 
surface rhythm rather than spatial orientation, simple harmonic 
composition rather than contrapuntal. Atsthetically it is less pro- 


found, the spectator’s response being more largely sensuous, with- 


out the same emotional depth. *" 
5 4 aie 
a 
> 
ro ee 
dhl 
> ie a, 


as 


Poon N So, DY PAUL GAUGUIN : 


But gorgeously sensuous values in painting are better than liter- 
ary or photographic or technical ones, and so this too must be 
granted a modern validity, as being revolutionary in a milder way. 
We shall hear more of the “decorative split” later on. Here I only 
want to guard against any reader’s zeal in trying to judge Gauguin, 
long grouped with the post-Impressionists, by the form-quality of 
Cezanne. Personally I prefer to consider the sensuous appeal in 
a Gauguin picture as a sort of first dimension of that deeper spatial 


order which is Cezanne’s—and both modern. 
& 


hs 


595 


a 


Nae 
= is 
a E az 


As a last prod to your thought about “form” I am putting a 
realistic 18th Century woodcut, in the familiar Bewickian style, 
at the top of the page, and at the bottom a somewhat emotionally ex- 
pressive beast, which might be by any one of a dozen modernist 
designers, or by someone of the period before imitation became an 
obsession—say, back in the 13th or 14th Century. Whatever it is, 
old or very new, it couldn’t have been done by artists in the period 
between. It might be well to think this out a little; then turn to the 


list of illustrations and learn its date. 


IV 


THE BACKGROUND 
IN MODERN LIFE 


“NS 


Cok t, ON CROSS—ABOUT 1200 


HIS statue seems to meet all the specifications of the modern 

art theory outlined in the last chapter. It has definite form- 
quality which speaks to the spectator emotionally. It is free of 
subject-interest in any immediate sense. It is unphotographic to 
the point of distortion. But it is not modern in time. It is, indeed, 
an expressionistic work of art done in a time when the word “Ex- 
pressionism” had not been dreamed of. The Expressionists are 


the latest group of 20th Century modernists: this statue dates from 
29 


ihe 12th or 13th Century. It is time to inquire how far the modern 
art movement is a return to the ancients and how far typically a 
product of today. 

I am conscious that I have failed to indicate with any exactness 
to what extent my introductory chapters, and particularly the 
sketch of the theoretical background, apply to all formal art, and 
how much should be attributed definitely to the forces of life today. 
In this last of the background chapters, before going on to the ac- 
tual story of the development from Impressionism to Expression- 
ism, I hope to clear up some of the clouds of confusion that have, 
perhaps necessarily, hung over our approach to the subject. 

In the light of the theory of expressive form suggested in the 
last chapter, it should be evident why the post-Impressionists claim 
as kin the Egyptians of the less elegant periods, the Cretans, several 
phases of Oriental art, the early Gothic sculptors and architects, 
El Greco, and the negro carvers. Whenever something in the na- 
ture of emotional content became of greater importance than quali- 
lies of imitation, lofty subject-matter, virtuosity, etc., the artists 
of that time created works that link them with the modernist group. 
It is clear, then, that mere adherence to the idea of an essential 
expressive form at the heart of artistic creation cannot be consid- 
ered an earmark of modern endeavor. Probably the theory has 
never before been so consciously formulated as in the last twenty 
years; but in so far as it is a foundation-post of modern art, that 
art builds into the finest, although not the most recent, periods of 
the past. 

Through adherence to this universal central idea of what consti- 


tutes art, the painter, sculptor or architect has been brought back to 


60 


a directness and simplicity that may or may not be considered primi- 
tive or archaic. Ornament is stripped away, flourish disappears, 
all the elements of what Clive Bell calls “technical swagger” are 
exorcised. It is a gain not to be reckoned lightly. 

Primitive man, whether of the Europe of thousands of years ago 
or of black Africa of today, is direct not only by instinct but by vir- 
tue of ignorance of elaboration. The cleverness of exact involved 
imitation, of intricate ornament, of the transfer of the values of one 
medium to the materials of another, is a development of more so- 
phisticated periods. Bored civilizations crave the distraction of 
ornament. People who know too much about nature let her 
“truths” limit their expression: they must stop to put in accidental 
shadows, perspective, background. The primitive cuts through 
these to the thing itself, standing out naked. 

It is necessary, if we are to have any art that is worthy the name, 
to get back to that directness, that nakedness, as a starting-point. 
To adopt primitive conventions along with the directness is a con- 


fession that we are poorer than savages. Doubtless in many ways 


DRAWING, BY MASEREEL 


OLD WOMAN WITH A (S20 
BYE RN oT (BAR LACH 


we are. But we cannot attain to their blessings by renouncing our 
own. The need is for modern expressiveness on a primitive or ele- 
mental foundation. 

In some of the arts there has been an “honest” period, a period 
of return to direct unadorned realism or imitationism, before the 
break into form-seeking post-Impressionism. In architecture Sul- 


livan and Berlage were crying out for an honest consideration of 


62 


structure and material before Wright, Mendelsohn and Taut began 
their experiments in modern expression. Maillol shook off the ad- 
ventitious Impressionistic qualities fastened on to sculpture by the 
generation of Rodin, and got back to plain honest sculptural quali- 
ties before Epstein, Gaudier, Lachaise and Lehmbruck began their 
practice of distortion for the sake of intensification. Even in 
painting, one of the three most-noted Post-Impressionists, Vincent 
Van Gogh, was most important for directness and simple honesty. 
And in those sub-arts where form-quality is necessarily incidental 
to representation—in illustration and in caricature—this return 
to directness is a chief characteristic of modern achievement. Could 
anything be more uninvolved than the little drawing by Masereel 
above? Could any primitive have gone more directly to the heart 
of his problem? No background, no detail, nothing but—cannon, 
churchman. The draughtsmen of the 19th Century did not think 
so simply. If that nakedness is primitive, ancient, let it be re- 
corded that modern art is not wholly modern. 

This sculpture in wood by Ernst Barlach, Old Woman with a 
Stick, typifies the period of return in sculpture. It is honest, with- 
out any dramatic or story-telling qualities, without ornament, and 
without asking that tribute of wonderment at faithfulness to life 
which Meunier, in a similar field, seems to demand. The example 
also serves to carry us over to consideration of another sort of 
return—to truth to materials. This is sculpture in wood, and the 
quality of the wood is in the very feel of it. 

The return to more intimate media—wood sculpture, etching 
(not reproductive but for its own sake), autographic wood engrav- 


ing, lithography, enamels, ceramics, etc.—is in itself an indication 


63 


of a new passion for direct expression. And throughout the arts 
the media are being explored for characteristic and essential values: 
stone no less than wood, paint (leading into light and mobile color) 
no less than words; and in architecture, steel, concrete and glass. 
How far the world had forgotten these essential values is clear when 
one remembers that few monumental statues of the 18th and 19th 
Centuries were cut by the “sculptors” themselves, and how com- 
pletely architecture and engineering were divorced, how exclusively 
the architect worked on paper. Fitness of material came as a mat- 
ter of instinct with the ancients. Twentieth Century art takes up 
that asset where it was dropped centuries ago. 

Let us turn to something in modern art that cannot be said merely 
to be reversion to other times, and so come at the question from 
the other direction. This Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella seems 
at first glance to be 100-per-cent up to date. But let us go forward 
a little carefully here; it is really less expressionistic than the 
Christ on the Cross at the head of the chapter. The point is that, 
with subject matter become so minor a part of art works, a 20th 
Century objective interest really carries us a very small bit 
on the way to true modernism. ‘The spirit which creates airships, 
automobiles, dynamos and Brooklyn Bridges concerns us very 
much, and these things may have in themselves art values. But as 
subjects for representation they are merely novel. The Futurists 
ran aground on that objective reef. Their technique, too, was il- 
lustrative. They illustrated, and repeated, the “force lines” of the 
modern machine age. But that has little to do with a new direct- 
ness, a formal significance or a new expressiveness. We shall meet 


these Futurists again in a separate chapter. Meantime Stella’s 


64 


ee 


Pi ewieN BRIDGE, BY JOSEPH .STELLA 


Brooklyn Bridge must be judged for something beyond subject 
values if it is to hold as a significant modern work. It fortunately 
has a quality that satisfies quite apart from any recognitional 
delight. 

The quality that is, perhaps, most indisputably and completely 
modern is intensity. The current of life has deepened, the rhythm 
has quickened, improved means of communication multiply the 
sensations that crowd upon us, travel enriches our impressions and 


fertilizes the mind, machines assail and toughen the nerves, lights 


65 


FROM MY PARIS WINDOW, 
BY “MARC CHAGAS 


are brighter and noises louder than ever before. Art cannot re- 
main as quiet as in the past: it must not slip back into being merely 
a refuge from life. Its values must be intensified. It must live up 
to its age. | 

Buildings are built higher than ever before, because more people 
crowd into a tiny area. The architect, being educated, begins by 
trying to disguise the height, breaking up the fagades in accord- 
ance with the rules of the established horizontal architecture. But 
finally modern-minded architect-builders catch the spirit of rising 
steel and concrete. They put up here and there buildings that glory 
in their height, that make capital of their thousand window open- 


ings, that reflect power and intensity. Painting finds new sensation 


66 


Ui <i Te AD Ny dk a 
BY, ROBERT DELAUNA Y 


values in purer color. Sculpture begins to compose again strongly 
in heavy blocky sculptural form-organizations. A few dramatists 
forsake the old playwriting formula and pile up emotional cli- 
maxes with little regard to “natural” transitions or background. 
Music jazzes up. Poetry seeks the intense palpitating image, and 
falls all over itself in a new freedom—or license. Directness, 
piling up, intensification become the order of the day. 

Only by some such process—doubtless overdone in spots, gen- 
erous spots, by the modernists—can art keep up with life. An 
anemic poeticism will not do. We are no breed of tender-nerved, 
modest-Lucy-by-the-doorstep, maiden-lady impressionables. (I 


question whether there exist any more maiden-ladies, in their 


67 


minds—vicariously they have all experienced the richer life.) Si- 
lence may be doubly grateful to us in contrast to the prevalent 
noise. But art will make use of the double effectiveness of that 
silence and the full intensity of the noise. The contrast is a new 
asset. 

Realism of the brutal sort that for a time paralleled Impres- 
sionism doubtless helped to prepare us for this intensity. Forain 
and Toulouse-Lautrec, the slum-explorers in fiction, the Wedekinds 
of drama, showed us that there is no more art in the surface aspects 
of poverty, prostitution and darkness than in the aspects of kings’ 
halls and sunny fields. But we did get a deeper sense of life pal- 
pitating under these things. And it is the business of modern art 
to get at the deeper reality that lies beyond realism. It is here 
that the rediscovery of “form” is matched by a life-quality that is 
of today. 

The psycho-analysts have helped. Any exploration of the re- 
gions nearer to the soul brings increased understanding, a firmer 
grasp on reality as against aspects and conventions. We must not 
let the neurosis-mad psycho-analysts explain modern art as merely 
wish-fulfillments, with objective sources in the subconscious—as a 
sort of outlet for repressed desire and discord. (The trouble is 
that there are many neurotic artists in the world today, and they 
give substance to the outlet theory.) But we may well follow up 
any clue that leads toward the inner sources of being and creation. 
And after all, transferred ideas, as in the work of Grosz, Campen- 
donk, Chagall and Klee, are likely to be more diverting than the 
dull transcriptions of nature done by the properly conscious acad- 


emician: just as Joyce’s Ulysses is likely to intrigue us more than 


68 


By SEI NRICH  CAMPENDONK 


Robert Chambers or the fiction magazines, or Eliot’s The Waste 
Land more than the Longfellow school of verse. 

Some critic has labelled the Ulysses sort of thing as belonging 
to the “stream of consciousness” school. Art becomes a spout 
for everything that passes on the plane of personal consciousness, 
whether it is outward objective impressions, mental throw-ins, or 
eruptions from the subconscious reservoir of repressions, instincts 
and desires. Grosz and Chagall particularly among the graphic 
artists lay themselves open to some such interpretation. But most 
of the modernists, from the plain Cezannists through the Cubists to 
the expressive-form Expressionists, join in counting such dumped- 


personality paintings as outside significant art accomplishment. . 


69 


About all these others there is always something in the nature of 
order or abstract esthetic purpose. Order is, in a sense, what they 
are after above all else. 

But Grosz, Klee, Campendonk and Chagall are all Expressionists 
when at their best, Dadaists at their least responsible moments, and 
of the dumped-personality school between times—on their neurotic, 
and sometimes frankly erotic days. One may add that even this 
school, contemporary with, if not growing out of the study of 
psycho-analysis, has its forerunners in history, for instance in 
Brueghel the Elder. 

The machine as art. While we deplore the lack of inventiveness 
and the reliance on imitative run-out ornament in our furniture- 
making, our hardware and our chinaware, we are prone to overlook 
a beauty that is wholly and typically modern in our everyday ma- 
chinery. The ordinary hand-telephone has its values in the direct- 
ness with which it is designed for its purpose, and in the simplicity 
and relationships of its lines and volumes. The machinery in the 
power house has a potent line-and-form fascination that anyone 
alive to art must feel. But most common in experience today is the 
esthetic value of the motor car. The boy who tells his father that 
“The new Buick is a beaut” is not merely being slangy. He has 
probably felt intuitively something that is soundly and effectively 
artistic. For the sheer volume-design of the automobile, its depend- 
ence upon stream lines and expressive mass instead of ornament for 
its “looks,” and its absolute sense of fleetness, are qualities that, 
within the field of the arts of use, bespeak art-sense, and qualities 
to which we respond instinctively. 


Now I know that it is not orthodox to appreciate these useful 


70 


modern things. Adherents of the classic, the romantic, the ideal- 
istic in art find it distasteful that anything so common should be 
identified with esthetic values. For generations art has been aloof 
from ordinary life. But if children weren’t taught so exclusively 
that the picture on the wall is art and the telephone and automobile 
merely useful, we should begin to accomplish a general return to 
instinctive appreciation. Why not tell the boy that his baseball 
bat, perfectly fashioned for its purpose and with a flowing sym- 
metry, has an element of beauty? Let him thrill over the new 
Buick, the latest Packard, the slick Pierce-Arrow. The modern 
locomotive is as thrillingly expressive as anything in the history 
of the useful arts. 

The esthetic values in these things are not clearly of that order 
with which we were concerned in the last chapter. In the first 
place and fundamentally, limitations of subject matter and of 
ultimate placing give way to limitations of use. And there can be 
no question here of subordinating that element to a conception of 


pure abstract form. But the formal element does enter, both out of 


the expressiveness of purpose—speed, as so beautifully conveyed 
in the design of a yacht, a motor-boat or an airplane; power, as 
in a large dynamo, a hoisting-machine or a gasoline engine—and 
out of the emotion of the machine-designer. The element of 
expressiveness of materials is notable, as in modern architecture 
and sculpture. The metal has its own quality of line and mass. 
There is loving manipulation of materials and essences here—for 
instinctive expression. Our response may be more nearly related 
to our sensuous response in the case of purely decorative art than 
to that deeper emotion we experience from profound pictorial 
organization; but it is a tribute to art—and modern. 

“Modern machine civilization, then, brings its own values in the 
useful arts. In the absolute arts, it adds to the rediscovery of form 
a new intensity. Directness is regained. Our own sort of order 
begins to appear, shaped at first somewhat by confusion. Life, not 


the desire for escape from life, urges us on to creation. 


Vv 


IMPRESSIONISM 
AND 
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 


e 


Pees N: SETTING SUN, BY CLAUDE MONET 


HIS pretty picture, although it was considered so strange and 
revolutionary a few decades ago that the painter was ridi- 
culed and vilified through a period of more than a dozen years, no 
longer seems eccentric. It even seems tame and unmodern. It 
fits back perfectly into the perspective of art history. It has 
hecome familiar—even in the fresh, brilliant coloring which the 
illustration does not show; it has served its purpose, it has gone 
into the museum of the past 
And yet this painting by Monet, this typical Impressionistic 


painting, has a definite place in a book on a developing modernism. 


75 


lt marks, so to speak, the jumping-off place. It is typical of the 
last phase of realism, against which modern art is most obviously 
a revolt. It is typical of realism in a very special way. Impres- 
sionism had worked realism down into the ultimate corner: where 
not merely any imitation of nature would do, but only an imitation 
of an immediate and evanescent aspect of nature. Impressionism 
in painting also links with contemporary work in a constructive 
way: it brought color to a purity and a scientific accuracy which 
afforded the necessary starting-point for the excursions of the true 
modernists. 

Impressionism, even in its color phase, was rooted in naturalism. 
Painters observed for the first time that the sky was not necessarily 
blue, or the tree green or the cow red. They discovered that, 
as seen, the sun inevitably puts yellow into the sky, and that a wood 
of green trees ordinarily exhibits, in its sunlit surfaces and its 
shadowed surfaces, almost every color of the spectrum. Even the 
earlier realistic painters had practically drawn their pictures in 
tone—that is, in black, white and intermediate grays—and had 
added color not as they saw it in nature but as they knew it to be 
in an absolute sense, blue sky, green tree and red cow. They 
darkened the shadows with black, without noticing that shadows 
ordinarily harbor a multitude of pure reflected colors. 

The Impressionists, of course, did not stumble upon this truth 
all at once and without precursors. In France, the home of good 
painting, the 19th Century began with a sterile classic revival, 
with the hard, pure draughtsmen’s pictures of David and Ingres. 
But almost immediately Delacroix appeared with a more human 


note, turned classicism to theatricalism, and broke into the road 


76 


that was to lead, a half-century later, to the freedom of Impres- 
sionism. Constable, in England, had begun to see shades of color 
in nature, and Turner was already thinking loosely in color, and 
in his water-colors anticipated unscientifically the feminine har- 
monies of Monet. But the harvest from the seed sown by these 
three pioneers was to be delayed another generation. In mid- 
century Courbet, the first passionate Realist—a bull in the China 
shop of French polite painting—went far toward clearing art of 
rhetoric and romantic ornament, and thus served modernity nega- 
tively. Followed Daumier, who is closer to the Post-Impressionist 
Cezanne than to the Impressionists—out of line—and Manet, who 
while skirting perilously close to decorative photography, com- 
pleted the liberating process. In little more than a half-century 
painting had travelled a mighty course, out of literary-romantic 
illustration toward an honest objective realism, out of tinted draw- 
ing toward an art into which color entered creatively. 

The Impressionists accepted the realistic limitation but became 
less absorbed in the object seen than in the way that object was 
shown up by light. Light itself became their obsession, what it 
struck secondary. Instead of considering a picture’s subject either 
in the old literary associative way, or in Manet’s compositional 
way, they saw it as an aspect. Their vision was truly visual. And 
of the moment. Naturally this was not an art of the studio, but of 
the open. And these painters were long known as the plein air 
school. After a dozen years it became apparent even to the public 
that painting through the many centuries of its history had been 
dark because it had been practiced in studios, where the subject 


had been overstudied until all freshness and life had gone out of 


fii 


ne De Ben 


PAINTING BY PAUL, SiGhage 


it. Even the Barbizon school had used blacks. Monet had really 
taken painting out-of-doors; for the first time it was really natural; 
this was pure beauty indeed. 

And certainly the revelation of rainbow tints must have come 
as a rare relief to many eyes wearied by miles of gray and brown 
canvases. The clear color that came in with the Impressionists has 
stayed through practically all phases of post-Impressionism; is 
apparently a permanent legacy to painting. But nowadays it is 
seldom put on canvas as scientifically and shallowly as it was in 
the last quarter of the 19th Century. 

The scientific basis for Monet’s technique—it harks back a little 
to Turner and Delacroix, and its really scientific formulation came 
later with men variously called Neo-Impressionists, Pointillists and 
Divisionists—is in this: a color mixed and laid flat never looks as 


brilliant and alive as spots or dashes of the original colors that 


78 


made up the mixture, juxtaposed on the canvas and merged by the 
retina of the eye at the right distance. Painters learned to disinte- 
grate color as apparently seen in nature. They practiced juxta- 
position of gobs of raw color—Divisionism. 

Painting became lively, full of minute contrast, the old grays 
and browns gave place to chromatic patterns. It might have ap- 
proached pure color creation—but it didn’t, because the artists 
faithfully copied the colors in decomposed nature. They copied 
a single landscape in its every aspect of light, from dawn to dusk. 
The coloring was different and therefore the picture was different. 
if they caught the atmospheric condition of the moment, in color, 
the goal was won. A fleeting impression—that had something to 
do with the sticking of the name “Impressionists,” if not with 
its origin. 

Many things valued by the older painting disappeared. Line 
melted away, silhouette was impossible, form was lost in atmos- 
phere. Color was gained, but what then? An impression of an 
aspect is hardly enough, even though the surface color be charm- 
ing. Unity of light leaves something to be desired by way of 
structure, bulk, form. The Impressionists had gained color for 
posterity, but they had lost organization. 

Pissarro and Monet were originators, and Monet the most famous 
master. His canvases are in all our big museums. His decom- 
posed color conveys to us the fresh prettiness of nature’s tenderest 
aspects. But in modernist company he appears spineless. Some- 
how we prefer, even within Impressionist ranks, the more varied 
and completer harmonies of Seurat—properly a Neo-Impressionist, 


and before his death very important as an innovator—and the gay 


79 


and dashing things painted in broken color by the Americans 
Childe Hassam and Frederick C. Frieseke, who added a flat com- 
positional strength to the lively technique of Monet. Frieseke’s 
Nude Seated, illustrated here, marks as well as anything painted 
by an Impressionist, the limits to which the feminine charm of 
the method can be carried. 

There was, of course, the luscious Renoir. He picked up the 
Impressionist method of disintegrating color and melting it to- 
gether. But he stuck by composition, stuck by the object in its 
own right as against its ephemeral aspect. He restored a rhythm 
of line and brought back something of forced structure. He was a 
sort of hothouse Impressionist, whose melting tones and fluent lines 
intrigue us more than ever did Monet or Sisley or Signac. In 
his company the Impressionists seem meager, almost cold. He 
“was a giant who is respected even by the post-Impressionists, for 
within the limits of a sensuous realistic art, bordering on form- 
creation, he was supreme—although his works that touch over 
into the new field were achieved rather by reflection. It is time 
to turn to Cezanne. 

It is seldom given to an artist to make history as Cezanne has 
made it. Even within the century, men before him had hinted 
at the thing he accomplished. But he in his own work achieved a 
revolution. Even when he was exhibiting with the Impressionists 
—themselves still considered rebels—he was off seeking a thing 
diametrically opposed to Impressionism. They were busy with 
the surface—he turned the painter’s eye within. They were real- 
ists. He put an end to the four-centuries reign of imitativeness 


in painting. Practically all the post-Impressionists acknowlédge 


80 


Pwiiiesomes ED, BY EF. CC. FRIES ER E 


him as a master, the Cubists found the basic principle of their 
formula in his work, the Expressionists claim him as their own. 
Even in the obscurity that hid him and his work from the world 
through most of his life (1839-1906). a few of the world’s most 
sensitive artists accorded him that sincerest form of compliment, 
imitation. And today nine-tenths of the painters who count—and 
the sculptors and etchers—are paying him that compliment more 
or less directly. : 

Let me digress for a moment to explain what I mean by “the 
painters who count.” In briefest statement it is the creative artists. 


That would include the men who are leaders or pioneers: Matisse, 


81 


Picasso, Derain, Kokoschka, Kandinsky—and here in America, 
Walt Kuhn, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Macdonald-Wright. It 
would include also, the largest group, those who fail of the stature 
of the leaders, either by token of a slighter achievement, or not 
fully realized powers, or some element of imitativeness, like Othon 
Friesz and Marie Laurencin and Vlaminck and a dozen others in 
France, and the Dutchman Van Dongen, and Klee, Pechstein, 
Heckel, Purrmann and a score such in Germany, and the English 
Duncan Grant and Wyndham Lewis, and over here the bulk of our 
progressives: Hartley, Sheeler, Weber, Walkowitz, Stella, Davies, 
Sterne, Demuth, Dove and Dickinson. These all are significant 
men, some important for utter originality which promises more 
than has been achieved, others—notably Davies—as more or less 
conventional painters who have broadened to the modernist move- 
ment. I would go even farther in applying the term, including the 
whole borderland between the academy and the outlaws, from 
Kroll, through Bellows and Henri and Sloan and Ernest Lawson 
back even to Hassam and Frieseke—who stand at the very peak 
of original work of the last phase. But I would exclude nine 
hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand works seen at the 
academy exhibitions, simply because the men who paint them 
are not esthetically creative. They are called artists, but the bulk 
of them are no better than color photographers, mediocre imitators 
of nature or of some earlier artist’s style. They are competent and 
facile tradesmen meeting the unfailing demand for pretty imita- 
tions of natural beauty, for technical stunts, for clever anecdotes 
in paint. They are sincere within their limited vision, learned 


within the coded rules, necessary so long as culture is guarded 


82 


by the conservatives of a materialistic civilization. They are typi- 
cally the academicians. 

Now I realize as well as the next fellow that all making of 
lists, all pigeon-holing of artists, is foolish, all talk of tendencies 
and movements childish, and particularly that to suggest boundary- 
lines between those who count and those who don’t constitutes a 
hazardous sort of prophecy. All these pastimes fade into insignifi- 
cance beside the accomplishment of the slightest bit of creative art 
work—as does all criticism. But if one becomes fairly sure he is 
not getting between the spectator and the picture, only pointing the 
way; and if he sets up theories not to pin art down but to help to 
an understanding: why then there seems to be little mischief in 
his lists and movements—and I am even flirting with the idea that 
the world has become so complex, permanently, that the critic, like 
the machine, has come to have a definite if a servile place in it. 
Only, like the machine, he ought to be obedient, unobtrusive, 
helpful. 

Cezanne is the perfect antithesis to those nine hundred and ninety- 
nine artists whom I have described as the competent tradesmen of 
art—the imitative intelligences, the reasonable professionals. He 
ignored the world, he gave his all to his art. He not only climbed 
above the limitation of seeing a landscape as ordinary people, or 
ordinary painters, see it; he gave his whole life to trying to realize 
in color the emotion he felt at something he divined out of that 
landscape. He did not make pictures for sale—indeed it is said 
he more often than not threw the day’s canvas into a handy ditch 
before reaching home. He lived to paint; individual pictures were 


nothing to him; his progress was marked by increasing achievement 


83 


MARSEILLES HARBOR, BY DE Wiki 


of the precious quality of expressive form. And he died despair- 
ing because he could not touch yet closer to pure form. So heedless 
was he of everything except this search that he gained for himself 
the reputation of being a misanthrope and even a madman, except 
to a very few. He evaded the draft for the war of 1870, secure 
through the resultant storm of criticism, in the knowledge that he 
was engaged in a pursuit infinitely more important. It is even 
recorded that he neglected to go to his own mother’s funeral because. 
he was absorbed in a painting. 

Even so individual and passionate an artist, in being modern, 
epitomizes certain things out of the immediate and distant past. 


Color—he was the intimate of Pissarro, and he could hardly 


2 


84 


have revolutionized painting had not the Impressionists made their 
advance. But he saw through Impressionism, guessed its shallow- 
ness, and studied the masters of all times. He is credited with 
saying that he wanted to make something solid and durable—like 
museum art—out of Impressionism. One can imagine him pausing 
before El Greco and perhaps Tintoretto out of all the rest, and 
his mind working furiously at a sort of distortion there apparent, 
coupled with a rare sort of expression. One sees him: packing off 
to the South of France in middle age, thus equipped, with color, 
with a vision of something to be realized beyond contemporary 
practice, beyond 19th or 18th or 17th Century achievement. 

What was this thing he was after—this new thing, yet old with 
El Greco, differently with Michael Angelo, flamboyantly with 
Rubens? He called it the “realization,” thus externalizing it from 
himself more than do the Expressionists; making it less subjective, 
less of him as an individual, and yet not of outward nature. He 
spoke much of the motive. He must penetrate nature to find it, 
not see the static surface but the dynamic essence. He must fix 
this on canvas, filter it through his passion as an artist and his 
craftsmanship as painter, until it was realized, as what? Form. 
That again is the only name we have for it—expressive form, 
significant form, voluminous form, esthetic form. 

Cezanne, being utterly disinterested in the aspects and attributes 
of nature, simply found nothing to hold him in the accidental 
prettiness of a landscape or the facial expression of a model, 
nothing in the atmosphere of a scene or in the revealing pose of a 
body. These were merely contributory bits to the larger problem 


of his art, and as often as not he deformed and distorted them 


85 


to get the right volume or the right slope or the right organization 
of color. Mere composition in the flat seemed incomplete, and he 
felt that he had nothing to learn from his popular contemporaries, 
Manet and Degas, or the unpopular Gauguin. He struck through 
surface nature and surface composition toward something which 
we must accept as the nearest approach to the soul of painting: 
organizational form expressed in color. There, too, he surpassed 
all who had preceded him, for even El Greco conceived form as 
separate from color—added objective coloring—whereas Cezanne 
resolved drawing and coloring into one process. Today practically 
the whole world of painting recognizes them as inseparable. 

In the chapter on theoretical background I showed the Bathers 
of Courbet and the Bathers of Cezanne side by side, as examples 
of the approaches of the illustrator and the seeker for form. If 
you are still in process of getting this crucial modernist distinction 
clear—and I take it you would not otherwise be reading a Primer 
—it will be well to turn back to pages 46 and 47 with the above 
paragraphs in mind. It is well to look particularly for the “reces- 
sion values.” 

The landscape shown here is equally innocent both of the ob- 
jective truth of the early realists and of the emphasized atmospheric 
fidelity of the Impressionists. It also lacks the clear surface com- 
positional values of Manet or Whistler or Degas. But it has the 
voluminous solidity, the poised form, the dynamic movement, that 
belong most characteristically to Cezanne. Perhaps even more 
essentially the “realization” is illustrated in the watercolor repro- 


duced at the head of the next chapter. 
Painters and the more recondite critics have discovered technical 


86 


a3 


LANDSCAPE WITH HOUSE, BY CEZANNE 


advances in Cezanne that seem to go far to explain the means by 
which he was able to come so near to revelation of form: methods 
of using and counter-weighting line and color, concentric har- 
monies, stereoscopic vision, etc. But these are not for an intro- 
ductory and unassuming book, and we may well turn to a brief 
inquiry regarding Cezanne’s contemporaries and his followers. 

It is easy to see parallel qualities in this landscape of Ko- 
koschka’s, although pure color is not particularly evident in his 
work up to 1920. Perhaps there is an illuminating point as well as 
an explanation in the fact that Kokoschka was less influenced di- 


rectly by Cezanne than by El Greco. If more artists had traced back 


87 


LANDSCAPE, BY KOROS CH 


certain characteristics of the revolutionary Frenchman, qualities 
he had partly inherited from giants of the past, they might have 
become more creative on their own accounts. Such a contemporary 
leader as Maurice de Vlaminck smacks a little too strongly of 
discipleship. In his soft landscapes (see page 84) he has a pretty 
feeling of Cezannish movement; but one is conscious that he tricks 
his master a little, much as Ribera tricked El Greco. But even 
such imitation, while not profound, is better than leadership in a 
phase that has passed. 

Two painters are ordinarily bracketed with Cezanne as the first 


Post-Impressionists. They are Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gau- 


88 


i 
oy 


re aS iy Ee é 
dors ow nd Oe a 


Peewwece th, BY VINCENT VAN GOGH 


guin, and both are of slighter stature. Particularly van Gogh—or 
Vincent, as he preferred it—loses in value as the perspective of the 
years gives greater bulk to the figure of Cezanne. But he was 
notable in his time as a revolutionary. 

Born a Dutchman, Vincent spent the most important part of his 
artist-life in France, beginning as a Neo-Impressionist, an illustra- 
tionist in broken color. When he finally caught his stride, he 
achieved a remarkable group of brilliantly colored canvases which 
struck a new note in their uncompromising sincerity and_ their 
straight honesty of color application. But it is less obvious that he 


escaped from a cramping realistic vision. Only seldom do his 


89 


paintings seem alive with that moving abstract form which alone 
could place him beside Cezanne at the fountain-head of modern 
painting. In the accompanying illustration, as in most of his work, 
there is a feeling of honest emotion, an Impressionistic simplifica- 
tion, and perhaps a bare hint of the freshness of coloring. It is not 
ungenerous to believe that when his art went deeper, it may have 
been due to something he had learned from Cezanne. In his own 
right Vincent stands for hardly more than a regained integrity, a 
passion for colored paint on its own account. He has been the more 
widely talked about for the tragic circumstances of his personal 
life. 

Gauguin’s is another story. Having got in mind the importance 
of Cezanne’s achievement to modern painting, one is likely to be 
misled by trying to apply the same tests to this third great Post- 
Impressionist. Here one encounters the chief split in the current 
of modern art. With or without warrant I am going to call 
Gauguin’s the Decorative stream. ‘There can be no doubt that the 
main current flows from Cezanne. Some critics are content to cut 
off Gauguin as summarily as they do van Gogh. But Gauguin’s 
achievement deserves better than that, and he did not die entirely 
without artistic progeny as did Vincent. There are those who claim 
that he discovered “form” as truly as did Cezanne. 

Form in painting, if we take it to be that essential quality which 
is the magic of Cezanne, is a fourth-dimensional attribute. It 
exists beyond and independent of the three dimensions of observed 
nature, or the three flattened to two in Manet and other composi- 
tional painters. But Gauguin, indebted to Manet up to a point, 


carried the flat composition over into something approaching pure 


90 


BEEATL OF PAINTING .BY GAUGUIN 


decoration. If its essential quality is to be called form at all, it is 
form dependent on surface organization of lines, masses and colors; 
it is not voluminous form, dynamic poised form. 

Gauguin, although frankly distorting the minor aspects of nature 
at times, and always broadening his work to the exclusion of de- 


tail, is not clearly of those who abandon appearance in favor of 


91 


the search for an abstract esthetic quality. He probably owed 
more to Giotto than to El Greco, more to Manet and to the Im- 
pressionists than to Cezanne—though there are Cezanne echoes too. 
He was revolutionary to the extent of turning to primitivism for a 
new simplicity, he abolished the Impressionist’s system of applying 
broken color but retained color clearness, but most of all he struck 
a fresh note in naive decorative appeal. 

Although many people whom I respect feel that his is a shallow 
sort of creativeness, I cannot do less than record that he safely es- 
caped the true realist’s effort at illusion, no one before him ever 
made gorgeous color so reposeful, no one ever made more attrac- 
live sensuous decorations. If the organization of form in this sort 
of painting is comparatively rudimentary—as in most Japanese 
art and in Whistler—and the approach not essentially unrealistic, 
still the pervading emotional quality is there and the harmonious 
rhythm of his compositions flows more freely than ever before. 

Let us say, then, that the main current of modern art, flowing 
on from Cezanne alone of the three original Post-Impressionists, 
is concerned with a fourth-dimensional sort of form that goes be- 
yond composition; but that there is also a current of decorative ef- 
fort, more superficial because it is concerned with sensuous appeal 
arising out of balance, rhythm and flat color rather than moving 
color and organizational color—and that this second stream is 
modern too. We shall meet it again, not by going to Gauguin’s 
pupil, Maurice Denis, because he has lapsed into a sentimental sort 
of decorative illustration, but in many odd corners of our Inde- 
pendent shows, and, its waters mixed with those of the Cezanne 


stream, in Matisse—the next giant of French modernism. 


92 


POlwwhait Or A GIRL, BY EDWAKD MUNCH 


North of France, however, two other Post-Impressionists are rec- 
ognized as having had great influence in shaping the course of what 
was later to become Expressionism. The Scandinavian Edward 
Munch has exerted with the rather posteresque composition of his 
paintings an influence not unlike Gauguin’s and Vincent’s toward 
honesty, freedom, sincerity, decorativeness—and his best work 
has more than a hint of Cezanne’s search. 

Even earlier the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler had forsaken Impres- 


sionism for a rhythmic sort of composition-painting, free from the 


93 


illusion fallacy of Manet, marked by a fine directness and_ back- 
groundless simplicity. It has a remarkable note of freshness in 
color composition—but only occasionally is it clear that he had a 
grasp on the form problem. Both Munch and Hodler were closely 
associated with the story of German painting over the century-end, 
and perhaps sowed the seed later watered by a knowledge of Ce- 
zanne and the direct discipleship to Matisse and Picasso. 

The chapter closes with Henri Matisse, because he more clearly 
than any other picked up the heritage of Cezanne and Gauguin and 
transmitted it to the younger generation. When he came along the 
Impressionists, the true revolutionaries at the beginning of the 
chapter, had become the academicists and the conservatives, and 
were subject to attack from the Neo-Impressionists, the Decorators 
and from a group of full-blooded realists. Out of the confusion 


of influences and counter-currents Matisse emerged, first with the 


4 ee 


HEAD OF "MME. CEZANNE 
BY CEZANNE 


Pe Nien Ga UY aMeA TIS SE 


healthy decorativeness of Gauguin, made emotionally his own, then 
with also, to a point, the precious form-understanding out of Ce- 
zanne. Absolutely free from literary values, striving for the 
naive approach, utterly unseduced by the realistic-imitative idea, 
a born colorist, he was destined in any case to be a leader. 

His story is best told perhaps by the three illustrations from his 
work. The one on page 19 is clearly an example of decorative 
organization in the Gauguin current, but simple, naked, as only 
the creative Matisse could make it. The little cut here, matched 
by one from Cezanne, is hardly more than a bit of pattern, and re- 
minds one that the artist had a Persian period of influence. But it 


is worth study as a modern approach to abstraction too. Later on, 


95 


in the chapter on Expressionism—to which he perhaps most truly 
belongs—is a work of another sort. But now that we are safely 
in a post-Impressionist era, with the modernist movement turning 
Expressionist, it is time to take up in order those catch-words, 


Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Abstraction. 


WOODCUT BY* DE VLAMINGE 


Vi 


CUBISM 


~ 


ee 


o% 


Werth RCOLOR BY CEZANNE 


* 


UBISM grew out of the post-Impressionism of Cezanne. The 
invention of Cubism is popularly credited to Pablo Picasso, 
a Spaniard who has been a leader in the French capital for many 
years. “Leader” is not applied in any loose sense. Picasso is a 
man of amazing versatility. Cubism marked but one phase of 
his activity. In each phase—his “blue period,” his “red period,” 
his “negro sculpture period’—he had followers and imitators; but 
in Cubism he instigated a world movement. Building from some- 
thing out of Cezanne, doubtless with equipment out of the negro 
sculpture period to aid, he erected a structure which became a storm 
center of the modernist movement for many years. 
In saying that Cubism was an outgrowth of the post-Impres- 


sionism of Cezanne, it is necessary to explain a very special signifi- 


99 


cance that some critics attach to the term “‘post-Impressionism.” In 
general it is used to designate those painters immediately following 
and rebelling from Impressionism, and for a time it was in wide 
currency as a term covering all currents counter to realism—al- 
though it is obviously too vague and negative for such duty. Its 
derivation as implied in both these uses is obviously from “post’”— 
after—“Impressionism.” But there is a meaning pinning it down 
more closely; this would apply it to art works in which not the “im- 
pression”’ counts, but the artist’s processes after he receives the im- 
pression. The emphasis is thus shifted to the artist’s emotion after 
(post) he has been impressed by an aspect of nature. 

Although this interpretation is by no means general, it may give 
us a clue to the thing the Cubists are after. For if a man be geo- 
metric-minded, in a sense, if it be the structure and not any par- 
ticular aspect that engages his emotions, the thing that crystallizes 
in him as an art “image” after the impression might well be of a 
more or less geometric character. Everyone who tries to analyze 
or describe the form-quality in a Cezanne painting comes sooner or 
later to the word “structure.” Self-contained movement, poised 
form, block-relationship, organized structure, order from within— 
these are all catch-phrases of the commentators on Cezannism. 
They all imply some quality structural, geometric. Cezanne him- 
self gave wings to the thought in something that he wrote. Picasso, © 
receptive, inventive, fertile, brought logic and experiment to bear. 
At a time when he was, perhaps, particularly geometric-min ed, he 
brought to flower Cubism. | 

The fundamental idea of Cubism is, I think, that it is possible 


to dissociate the planes of an object seen, and to rearrange them 


100 


LANDSCAPE, BY GEORGES BRAQUE 


in a picture, so organized that they will give a truer emotional or 
structural sense than the original “appearance.” One sees an ob- 
ject from one ‘side; it is an incomplete vision. A complete vision 
would shew it not only as synthesized visually from all sides and 
aspects, but as it is from within. Perhaps there is a mathematical 
equivalent for such vision. In painting it must have to do with 
planes” Wianes must be organized, then, to express the painter’s 
esthetic emotion of it. 

In the earlier Cubist pictures the planes seemed to be merely 


flattened out, and the intersections accented. The organization of 


101 


DRAWING BY PICASSO 


the accented lines in the picture might be decoratively creative, but 
in general this was merely a summary and simplified sort of illus- 
tration. Then came the phase of disorganizing the planes. of -re- 
ality and rearranging them in an arbitrary order. They were made 
to intersect and overlap at will, the structural reorganization being 
what counted. This took Cubism out of the category of modified 
surface representation and put it directly into line with Cezanne’s 
search—in so far as anyone could link with him and renounce color. 
For most of the dyed-in-the-wool Cubists worked in tone, browns 
and grays, totally overlooking a good half of Cezanne’s legacy— 
the knowledge that color might be made to bend a plane backward 


102 


or forward, build structurally, be the backbone of esthetic organ- 
ization. 

Now color organization may not be necessary for expression as 
we have defined it—otherwise form would never be found in 
sculpture, etching, etc., and we can detect it in those arts; it is in- 
deed their reason for being. But color is a particular conditioning 
factor in painting. The limitation of color lack has, indeed, gone 
far to nullify the value of the actual paintings of the doctrinaire 
Cubists, although their experiments have put painting ahead. 

The illustrations of this chapter show the development graphi- 
cally from Cezanne to the full-fledged theoreticians of Cubism and 
down to the sterile decadents. The Cezanne watercolor a few pages 


back indicates how much that artist had to do with inspiring the 


WOMAN WITH A MANDOLIN, 
BY. Picasso 


WOMAN WITH A MANDOLIN, 
BY PICASSO 

movement. Then the smallest Picasso reproduction, the first 
Woman with a Mandolin, suggests the breaking-in process, the flat- 
tening of planes, the accentuation of intersections, and the occa- 
sional slight dislocation of objective planes. This was in the inter- 
mediate period, before the name “Cubism” had come into vogue 
and before any group or school exhibition. Even earlier Georges 
Braque had exhibited the Viaduct at l’Estaque, which is character- 
ized by a similar treatment of planes, though more reminiscent of 
Cezanne. Braque became the most important of the practitioners 
of Cubism aside from Picasso. . 

The second Woman with a Mandolin shown here is of the period 
when the artists have begun to pull apart the planes of nature and 


104 


reorganize them for structural purposes. Speaking entirely physi- 
cally, the woman might appear more firmly structural if merely 
photographed as is, without being decomposed as to her planes; 
but there can be no doubt that Picasso has achieved some sort of 
abstract organization in the re-arrangement which gives the com- 
position a formal value of its own. And if we do not find the dis- 
tortion of nature too much of a petty distraction, we are likely to 
get a true emotional reaction from it. It is worth while to note how 
the overlapping of planes is manipulated, certain other planes 
brought forward and still others obscured, and the displacement 


of volumes in the background as well as in the figure. In the 


MAN WITH A MANDOLIN, 
BY “PICASSO 


Man with a Mandolin Picasso has simply carried elimination fur- 
ther. I am adding (page 102) a notably sensitive “normal” 
drawing by Picasso, for the particular benefit of those who are 
accustomed to say, “Oh, the Cubists paint that way because they 
never learned to draw.” 

Picasso achieves something of a synthesis when he starts from an 
objective model, and his canvases invariably speak some esthetic 
meaning, perhaps only in a sensuously decorative way, perhaps 
more deeply. At best his Cubistic pictures have undeniable, even 
profound, form-value. But the great mass of Cubist work outside 
of two or three such creative men, seems shallow and insignificant. 
When natural forms are broken up arbitrarily, the only excuse for 
their re-arrangement is creative composition, and most of the Cub- 
ists seem to arrive at only a sterile sort of intellectual puzzle- 
picture or a flat, rather uninteresting decoration. 

Certain tenets of the Cubist faith hold much of suggestive value 
for the general advancement of painting. In declaring himself 
against the existence of any dead planes in a canvas, the Cubist hit 
upon a principle that will bear extensive study, for its implications 
of eliminating inessentials and the resultant possibility of multiply- 
ing essentials. This should logically lead to that sort of emotional 
intensification which is a first aim of modernism. There is also a 
pregnant idea behind the principle of Simultaneity. This, as ad- 
vanced by the Cubists, is not to be confused with the simultaneous 
depiction of successive phases of movement as practiced by the 
later Futurists in their kinematographic painting. It is the prin- 
ciple of looking, in memory, at all the outward aspects of an object 


at once, thus getting a sort of composite or synthetic view of it. 


106 


Paki kk OPLE SEATED, 
BY ALBERT GLEIZES 


Here again is means to intensification. But the Cubists in general, 
instead of letting these principles free their creative powers, made 
the principles their gods, followed them too logically and ended 
perilously close to esthetic sterility. 

Having renounced the aid of color in a desire to be truer to their 
abstract principles, they had lost more than half the battle as 
painters at the very start. (Any color will do in painting—but this 
was an evasion of color.) A good half of the school, moreover, 
became enamoured of the dogmatic notion that there is something 
essentially untrue to painting in going beyond two dimensions. 
They flattened out their compositions and went off on a tack directly 
away from Cezanne. Nothing could be more typical of that phase 
than the Three People Seated by Albert Gleizes. 

In a recent book called Du Cubisme et des Moyens de le Com- 


prendre, Gleizes talks of this sort of art having touched at last the 


107 


FUMEUR. ET PAY SAGES 
BY FERNAND LEGER 


fundamental verities, and prophesies the future glories the Cubist 
painters are destined for. He wisely talks of inspiration and sen- 
sibility and an eye for synthesis as the qualitative elements in paint- 
ing, but the constructive elements seem to run too much to mechan- 
ics. This one illustration of his work, however, explains his self- 
imposed limitations better than words. Jean Metzinger and Juan 
Gris are the best known of his companions in this line-and-patch 
sort of painting, and Francis Picabia was a disciple between his 
Spanish and Dada periods. 

Fernand Leger goes considerably deeper, and seems to have an 


instinctive understanding that displacement of planes is justified 


108 


WINTER, BY «KANDINSKY 


only by a creative re-arrangement; that natural forms are to be 
used or discarded or distorted solely as demanded by the form 
necessities, the voluminous organization, of his picture. Leger’s 
Fumeur et Paysage indicates the trend of his work and his closer 
affinity with Picasso, and consequently his nearer alliance with 
Cezanne. 

It will be noticed that through the series of illustrations in this 
chapter we have been working closer and closer to abstraction. 
That indeed is the logical progression—attempted improvisation in 
abstract form—the final answer to the Cubist desire to disorganize 
objective nature. And if the average Cubist had given himself up 
to composition of that sort, untrammeled by his code of laws, and 


with color, he might live more importantly in the history of art. 


109 


HEAD -OF RUDOLF BLUEMN2 
BY WILLIAM’ WAUER 


But we shall meet abstraction again—a whole chapter of it. This 
picture by Kandinsky is inserted here to suggest a possible con- 
nection between Cubism and that foremost “composer in musical 
color.” 

Certain avowed Cubists did turn back to color, and there was a 
special name for them: Orphists. But they seem to have been 
simply minor Kandinskys with inherited Cubistic limitations, and 


they need not engage our attention longer. Delaunay, who was 


110 


connected with that group, painted also some famous disintegrated 
views of Paris which probably won attention more by their novelty 
than by profound esthetic values. He doubtless influenced the then 
budding Expressionists, and he anticipated that bigness of organiza- 
tion which is in their canvases today; but his distortions are often 
too literal to escape sidetracking the spectator’s attention to ines- 
sentials. The little picture on page 67 almost obscures any com- 
positional intention the painter may have had, because it engages 
the spectator’s interest as apparently a very naturalistic study of 
an earthquake. 

I should have said at first, perhaps, that the chief danger in ap- 
proaching Cubism is to think that it means merely giving a physi- 
cally cubed aspect to objective nature. In the process of simplifi- 
cation, solids in a Cubist picture are likely to take shape suggest- 
ing the squaring and projection of planes; and the repeated “ray” 
lines of some artists add suggestiveness to the name. It was Ma- 
tisse who coined the term, without serious intent, and later the paint- 
ers adopted it officially. A few artists have accepted the literal im- 
plications of the word. The German-American Lionel Feininger 
has perhaps made the straight-edge sort of composition more sig- 
nificant than anyone else. This Vollersroda illustration has caught 
something deeper than mere surface play. 

The most valuable legacy of cubism, however, is in the indirect 
effect it had upon men who never subscribed to its coded principles. 
Many artists must have felt it a further warrant for cutting them- 
selves off from literary and representative elements in painting; 
not a few, like Franz Marc, found a structural strength which lasted 


over, or perhaps led them into more vital work in abstraction or 


ie 


Expressionism later. Sculpture felt a new impulse to look within. 
A few men like Arthur B. Davies toyed with the idea of banishing 
dead planes and repeating essentials, but with little more than sur- 
face effect. Some lesser spirits lapsed into the futilities of Dad- 
aism. But Cubism is best summed up in Picasso, who invented it, 
did some remarkably interesting things with it, but passed on to 


other tasks—enriched. 


VOLLERSRODA, BY LIONEL FEININGE. 


Valet 


Buen wits M 


e<, Gren st Gn E. BY GINO SEVERINI 


> 


UTURISM descended upon the world from Italy. It embraced 

at once a literary heresy, a “movement” in the graphic arts, 

and an extraordinary means of self-advertisement for a group of 
young Italian intellectuals. Its intellectual-literary origin is im- 
portant, because it goes far to explain why Futurism became a 
world’s wonder and an influence on the development of painting, 
although no one ever saw a Futurist painting that had values pro- 
founder than novelty, arresting color or shallow decorative effec- 


tiveness. ee | 


The Futurists have been the champion manifesto-makers of all 


the schools of modernism. Their leader—both spokesman and 


* 
; pee y 


. aye a “A a : ! 5 


iK t F * 4 , *, 
29 7 4 | eee 2 
MARINETTI, BW KUIst oN : 


financial sustainer—the poet Marinetti, had the Manifesto habit. A 
Futurist manifesto was likely to be nine- -tenths anarchism and good 
old-fashioned bunk, and one-tenth shrewd and forward- ‘looking. 
thought about art. The rapid periodic appearance of these Jiter- 
ary bombs had two good effects: the shock jolted | loose'a lot of be- | 
lated Impressionists, dogma-bound Cubists and blind. followers of 
Cezanne, and started them to seeking on their ‘own account; and the 
fraction of artistic truth, although unrealized in the works of the 
five chief Futurist painters, gave impetus to the theoretical current 
toward pure painting. 

It was Gordon Craig who said: “There has been a positive need ~ 
for the Futurists ever since the first ass wagged its tail before the . 
portrait of a carrot.’ There one has a reason indeed. The Futur. 
ists or anyone else should be listened to if they promise an escape — 
from dull photographic painting, no matter what the substitute. | 
Craig goes on to point out that their substitute is only a portrait of 


116 OE are 


chaotic civilization as it has become: snapshots of the “noises, 
jerks and squirms” of the external world we live in, in place of 
snapshots of the girl with the parasol, the nude model, the fish and 
copper kettle; the wintry landscape, which have crowded academy 
halls for generations. The ironic point is that Futurism, in that it 
ny concerned snapshots at all, reverted to 17th-18th-19th Century art, 
returned to representation, denied Cezanne, negated the future. 

The statements of the Futurists are likely to begin self-consciously 

5 ‘like this: “We are young and our art is violently revolutionary.” 
ire Then follow their respects to the Cubists and other outmoded radi- 
cals. “They obstinately continue to paint objects motionless, 
B* - frozen, and all | the: static aspects of nature. . . . We, on the con- 
trary, with points of view pertaining ae ie to the future, seek 
f or a ae of motion, a thing which has never been attempted before 
Bo Pit t Ta paint from the posing model is an absurdity, and an 


ee, -act of Bia cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the 
picture in linear, spherical or cubic forms.” 


The maiter of motion is, indeed, always at the bottom of their 
picture making, ranging from mere photographed outward action 
to experiments with dynamic “force-lines.” The first Futurist 


manifesto began: 


eg .1. Our desire for the truth no longer contents itself with form and 
oo. color er ‘heretofore understood. 
eis ‘2s What we wish to reproduce on the canvas is not an instant or a 
~ inoment ‘of immobility of the universal force that surrounds us, but the 
te "sensation of that force itself. 
3. As a matter ‘of fact everything moves, everything runs, everything 


a rapidly. A gle is never immobile before us, but it appears 


ie sei 117 


. 


and disappears without ceasing. Given the fact of the momentary per- 
sistence of the image on the retina, objects in movement multiply, change 
form and follow like vibrations in space. A running horse has not four 
legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular. + 

4. Nothing is absolute in painting. That which was a truth for the 
painters of yesterday, is a lie for those of today. We declare, for example, 
that a portrait should not resemble its sitter, and that the painter carries 
in his own imagination the landscape he wishes to place upon the canvas. 

5. To paint the human figure it is not necessary to paint the figure but 
simply to give its envelopment. Space does not exist. Millions of miles 
separate us from the sun, yet that is no reason why the house before us | 
should not be incased in the solar disk. In our work we can secure effects 
similar to those of the X-ray. Opacity does not exist... . 

The sixteen persons about us in a moving omnibus are in turn and 
at the same time, one, ten, four, three; they are immobile and yet move; 
they go, come, bounding along the street, suddenly lost in the sun, then 
return seated before you, like so many symbols persistent of universal 
vibration. ‘es 

How often it happens that upon the cheek of the person with whom we 
are talking we see the horse that passes far away at the end of the street. 
Our bodies become parts of the seat upon which we rest and the seat 
becomes part of us. The omnibus merges in the houses that it passes, and 
the houses mix with the bus and become part of it. 

6. The construction of pictures up to this time has been stupidly tradi- 
tional. Painters have always shown things and persons before us. We 
place the spectator in the midst of the picture. iy 

Heretofore we have looked at pictures; it is the idea of the Futurist 
that we should look through them, that the pictures should give us new 


visions of life and things, new sensations, new emotions. . . . 


ve, 7 
Some of the Futurist painters seem never to have read beyond the 


third paragraph in this manifesto. At any rate Giacomo Balla 


118 


MONVEWEGe DOG IN LEASH, 
BY Gus COMO BALLA 


gives us pretty illustrations of objects in action with repeated out- 
lines indicating movement, blurring away at the edges like photo- 
graphs that have not been snapped quickly enough. What a juve- 
nile conception of art this was is indicated in the Moving Dog in 
Leash above. But it illustrates a basic principle of Futurism. 
The point that “opacity does not exist’ and the attempt to “place 
the spectator in.the midst of the picture” are illustrated in the dance 
scene of Severini at the head of the chapter. There is here not 
merely simultaneous recording of recurrent aspects of a moving 
object, as in Balla’s elementary work, but an intriguing puzzle- 
layout of bits remembered, repeated, pattern-arranged. Elsewhere 
the Futurists have recorded: ““The simultaneousness of states of 
mind in the work of art: that is the intoxicating aim of our art. 
. . . In painting a person, on a balcony, seen from inside the room, 
we oh not limit the. scene ‘to what the square frame of the window 
renders visible; but we try to render the sum total of visual sen- 


sations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun- 


119 


bathed throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch 
to right and left, the beflowered balconies, etc. This implies the 
simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the disloca- 
tion and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of 
details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one an- 
other.” 

Here, of course, the true Futurist simultaneity of action is added 
to the Cubist idea of synthetic simultaneity of remembered static 
aspects. Gino Severini, whose dance scene so perfectly illustrates 
the point, later turned Cubist of the Gleizes type—although more 
recently he has reverted to a sort of mathematical classicism. 

The third portion of the original manifesto includes a series of 
declarations against imitation, the tyranny of “harmony” and “good 
taste,” art critics, bituminous colors, false modernism, and the 
nude in painting—this last not on moral grounds, but because of 
the monotony of our “galleries of portraits of disreputables.” 
This portion of the document contains also two constructive points: 
“That it is necessary to brush aside all the subjects already used, 
in order to adequately express our turbulent life of steel, of pride, 
of feverish rapidity.” And “that the universal force must be shown 
in painting as a sensation dynamic.” 

The supposition that dealing with modern subjects—steel and 
rapidity—will make a modern art, is as childish as the theory of 
recording simultaneity of successive movements. A creative art- 
ist’s picture may as well be evoked by something out of Babylon 
as something out of an airplane or a motor car. But out of the 
“dynamic sensation” idea the Futurists developed a new sort of 


illustration. It is illustration, because you are no nearer to esthetic 


120 


DYNAMISM OP CANS bo BY RUSS OL O 


creation when you are merely recording force lines than when you 
are painting academically the objective aspects of nature. 

If the Futurists had grasped all they were after by way of rhythm, 
it might be a different story. “We have declared in our manifesto 
that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, 
the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, 
or, to put it more exactly, its interior force.” But they limit them- 
selves by discovering that “every object reveals by its lines how 
it would resolve itself were it to follow the tendencies of its forces’; 
and when they actually paint they bring forth things like Russolo’s 
Dynamism of an Auto, wherein the recorded force lines are the 
design. Russolo made a formula of the repeated angles of this 
picture. The same diagram would answer for his Train at Full 
Speed and his Revolution. 


121 


FUNERAL .OF THE -ANARCHIS Heeger. 
BY osC Ash REA 


Farther removed from mere “motion effects’ is the work of 
Carlo D. Carra. The sense of movement in the other pictures shown 
has been on the surface. There is more real movement, in an 
eesthetic sense, in one of Cezanne’s paintings than in anything that 
the Futurists have left to us. But Carra had at least a glimmer of 
the deeper thing. 

What then is the real heritage to painting out of Futurism? The 
emphasis on modern life, in spite of the Futurists’ own lapse to 
mere illustration, had its salutary effects. The general shaking- 
down process, following the shock of the manifestoes and the first 
exhibitions, also contributed to the impulse of the modernist move- 
ment. A few principles, like that of getting inside the picture, live 


on. The futility of the general practice of the coded laws may have 


122 


EULCURTSS SCULPTURE, 
BY BOC CrON! 


led some painters to a closer grapple with the mysteries of abstrac- 
tion. But roughly speaking Futurism blew up, because the world 
came to recognize that it embraced a return to straight representa- 
tion. And the full current of progress is in the opposite direction. 

America has perhaps the most effective contemporary practi- 
tioner of Futurism, in Joseph Stella, an Italian-American—and even 
he is more significant for other phases of his varied talent. His 
Brooklyn Bridge is reproduced on page 65. The English Nevinson 
went through a Futurist period, but one feels that the virus didn’t 


123 


really take. The Vorticists have been accused of being merely 
decadent Futurists, but that is hardly fair. 

Boccioni was sculptor as well as painter. His statues have al- 
ways seemed to me a pulling-to-pieces of plastic form, instead of 
mass organization. His Synthesis of Human Dynamism tells the 
whole story. One quite prefers that sort of elementary repeat- 
line Futurism, occasionally applied to sculpture, which the Ger- 
mans call “Kinetismus.” At least it has honest surface values in 
its unassuming and amusing cleverness. Of that sort of cleverness 
is the use to which E. McKnight Kauffer put Futurist ideas in this 
tailpiece, called Flight. Cleverness just about. measures the depth 


of Futurism. Cezanne and Kokoschka and Marin have n never been 


clever. 


VIII 


SGHO OLS, EADS 
AND SENSATIONS 


mf, J 


PEGASUS, 


BY ODILON REDO 


” 


YT HE picture here is not in the slightest Cubistic or Futuristic; 

nor is it obviously related to that sort of modernist painting 
that flowed from Cezanne through Matisse to the “Junge Kunst” 
groups in many lands. It has beauty of a sort, even in this repro- 
duction which does not show the lovely coloring. We may well 
pause to ask, is this modern art? 

There are two special sorts of difficulty for a critic who is fool 
enough to try to interpret for his readers a world “movement” in 
art. One exists in the possibly two or three important artists in 
each generation who defy classification with any current or tend- 
ency—who are out of time altogether. The other exists in the ne- 
cessity to pause and explain away certain minor “schools” that 
arise, and by the sheer noise of their shouting, or the startling na- 
ture of their painting, shock the world into attention for a period. 
I, the fool in this case, have set aside this chapter to get out of the 
way such sensations as Vorticism, Dadaism and Tatlinism—and to 
say a word about one or two unrelated giants who simply cannot be 
overlooked. 

The picture on the opposite page shows a painting by Odilon 
Redon, a French painter who died six years ago. He was thus a 
contemporary of the Impressionists and of the post-Impressionists 
—from Cezanne to Picasso. But he might just as well have lived 
out of time and place. He was a true Independent. 

Redon’s art, reveling in a rare glory of fresh coloring, has to do 
with life in its dreamiest aspects, as if one might lie forever looking 
at a cloud, or a butterfly, or a woman’s breast, or an orchid. His 
paintings tempt one to think that art may after all exist in legends 


and delicate experience, rather than in some independent living 


127 


esthetic truth: that one may imitate living things (or imagined and 
legendary things), and score as creative artist if one’s selective 
sense is fastidious enough, one’s touch lyric enough. Redon 
avoided the vulgarly dramatic; in an age when realism was only 
beginning to be challenged, he tempered his own realism with 
poetry, with melody, with living in the secret places. He had the 
grace to walk clear of all the materialistic things in nature, letting 
an imaginative music drown the horrible and common sounds that 
seem to have been in the ears of most painters of his time. 

Such art as his marks not an intenser entry into life, but a sensi- 
tive withdrawal from life. That alone is enough to separate it from 
the burgeoning art of today. But there is, too, the fact that his 
painting is essentially on the side of imitation as against expres- 
sion. It may be that painting the spiritual aspect of an object will 
become the pursuit of some new modernism of the future. Then 
Redon will be looked back to as the master. But as long as the 
present current flows, seeking form within the canvas before all 
else, no matter how many intermingled minor currents there may 
be, Redon will be an outsider. He was not giant enough to turn 
the current. But let it be added, he was an outsider whom the 
out-and-out modernists respected—and upon whom, | think, they 
still cast now and then a rather wistful glance. 

A second Independent, who is even more important historically, 
and who made a contribution intrinsically valued as highly as 
Redon’s, was Henri Rousseau. His canvases are particularly treas- 
ured by those who find relief from the dullness, self-consciousness 
and pretension of academy art in a child-like naiveté and detach- 


ment. Rousseau throughout his life was perfectly the child-man, 


128 


Powis NDS CAPE, BY HENRI ROUSSEAU 


with apparently an incorruptible child’s-freshness. He was un- 
troubled by any respect for naturalness, perspective or any other 
traditional rule or quality of painting, and he frankly gave himself 
up to his somewhat limited fancy. He was less the Primitive with 
whose virtues he has been reproached, than the imaginative child 
who delights in fixing the features of Aunt Molly stiffly into the 
wholly arbitrary foliation of a romantic garden, or placing fanci- 
ful beasts in exotic and luscious forests. He treated familiar land- 
scapes or people with other-worldly aloofness, or wandered in 
imaginative gardens and woods such as one is supposed to cease 
imagining when one graduates into grammar school. It was this 
child mind, and its pictures, that drew to Rousseau le Douanier 


the friendship and the praise of many of the foremost artists and 
. 129 


critics of the Paris of ten or twenty years ago. They appreciated 
his work for much the same reason that lay behind their deification 
of negro sculpture: it was direct, simple, immediate, the fruit of an 
unspoiled emotional approach to art. 

The influence of Rousseau was very great for a time, although 
it has waned a little in the last five years. His sort of art will 
always find ready appreciation where people are revolting from 
too much tradition and too much sophistication. It has a quiet and 
fresh charm that comes gratefully in the midst of so much virtu- 
osity and striving. But if one took to it for a steady diet, one might 
begin to detect an anachronistic note in it—or perhaps a lack of a 
certain fullness that belongs to these times. Never to go beyond it 
would seem like loving only seventeen-year-old girls all one’s life. 

In America there have been many artists who have gone through 
a Rousseau-influenced period—and a mighty good tonic it is too, 
if an artist can get back to that clearness of vision—and a few have 
remained there, although as yet without achieving the authentic 
naiveté through any long and important series of works. New York 
is fortunate in having a gallery—that of Stephan Bourgeois—where 
a collection of these “detached” and fanciful paintings can always 
be seen: utterly simplified and flatly colored compositions by Emile 
Branchard, shy little drawing-paintings by Jennings Tofel, delicate 
flower studies and poetic abstractions by Joseph Stella, and a wide 
range of similar unsophisticated and remote excursions. All these 
are undoubtedly in the direct line of protest against naturalism, and 
charming, but as a collection they seem to some of us to be a little 
off the main road of progress, too ascetically aside from the in- 


tensely emotional, dynamic art of the rich life of today. Like 


130 


Redon’s works, those of Rousseau and his followers must be marked 
as out of the main current because they smack of a delicate with- 
drawal, a sensitive return, rather than of a meeting with the condi- 
tions of modern life. 

If the vogue for Rousseau has a little passed—there will always 
happily be worshippers at his shrine—there is another vogue ap- 
parently developing, for the very beautiful work of Georges Seurat. 
He used to be called a Neo-Impressionist, and his paintings were 
Jargely lost to public sight after his death, when the Divisionists 
were being eclipsed by the excitement over the original post-Im- 
pressionists and the Fauves. But now painters and critics are re- 
discovering that Seurat used his color in a new and extremely ef- 
fective way, and apparently was headed for compositional achieve- 
ments beyond those of any of his predecessors except Cezanne. He 
evolved his delicate technique out of Impressionism, but he added 
an un-Impressionistic solidity of organization; and in his later 
work he coupled a feeling for moving form with a rainbow-tint 
freshness of coloring. There is in these paintings what I can only 
describe as an opalescent “underlay’—as if over or beyond the 
compositional thing there is an enriching counterplay of color. It 
is a quality that has been achieved elsewhere only by Ernest Law- 
son, among all the artists I can call to mind. This sort of color wiz- 
ardry is what served to place Lawson foremost among American 
landscapists—so that he is head and shoulders above the rather 
literal group of belated Impressionists from which he stems. An- 
other American who has attained to a very individual sort of Neo- 
Impressionism is Maurice Prendergast. He composes virile color- 


_ pattern paintings which have done much to enliven our too-dull exhi- 


131 


LA BAIGNADE, BY GEORGES 752.0577 


bition halls these many years. But both Lawson and Prendergast 
are individualists with definite limitations—whereas Seurat gives 
promise of very strongly affecting a wide group of important young 
painters. 

There are probably many Englishmen who will ask why 
Augustus John is not similarly an independent giant, demanding 
a giant’s due, like Redon, Rousseau and Seurat. I rather think 
John will not last in his own niche so long as these others in theirs 
—it is equally clear that he is outside the main discussion. He 
did much to rescue English painting out of tag-end Impressionism 
and native sentimental realism; he brought a new note of vigor and 
color and simplicity, but it is not so clear that he escapes an aca- 


demicism as blighting ultimately as the sort he revolted from. His 


132 


early works had a daring simplicity and directness; but he fell on 
the decorative side of the fence. He must be reckoned in, but one 
feels, rather regretfully, that what might have developed into a 
creative feeling for color-form turned instead into a posteresque 
talent. © 

It is rather for one of the sensations of the school sort that I am 
turning to England here. Vorticism was a purely British develop- 
ment in locale, although an American and a Frenchman, resident 
in London, together with one Englishman made most of the noise 
and had most of the talent. In the visual arts, the sculptor Gaudier- 
Brzeska was the one real genius of the group, and he was taken 
away in the war when he was just beginning to show his true great- 
ness. Ezra Pound linked the school to Imagism in poetry, and did 
much to argue the development into alignment with the course of 
modern art. And Wyndham Lewis, chief painter of the group and 
its most consistent spokesman, has made significant contributions 
to modern experiment in painting. 

The Vorticists joined with their predecessors the Futurists in 
making war on the Cubists. No more nature-morte; no more posed 
model. They also wisely judged that although Futurism was more 
modern in a purely jazzy way, the Futurist painters tended to be- 
come pedants and illustrators of motion. (The common English 
conservative habit of calling the Vorticists themselves merely a spe- 
cial brand of Futurist, probably arose from ignorance of real Fu- 
turism, the term being used as a sort of handy all-round term of 
opprobrium for radicals.) The Vorticists also took care to shy a 
bomb or two at the abstract Expressionism advocated by Kandinsky, 


feeling that there was something dead about what they called spook 


133 


ROTTERDAM, 
BY EDWARD WADSWORTH 


composition, just as there was something dead about the Cubists’ 
nature-morte, 

They began with the theory that every painting must be in some 
slight sense representative. But: “The first reason for not imitat- 
ing nature is that you cannot convey the emotion you receive at 
contact of nature by imitating her, but only by becoming her. 
. . . The essence of an object is beyond, and often in contradiction 
to, its simple truth. . . . The sense of objects, even, is a sense of 
the significance of the object, and not its avoirdupois and scientifi- 
cally ascertainable shapes and perspectives. If the material world 
were . . . organized as in the imagination, we should live as 
though we were dreaming. Art’s business is to show how, then, life 
would be. . . . Imitation, and inherently unselective registering of 


impressions, is an absurdity. It will never give you even the feel- 


134 


ing of the weight of the object, and certainly not the meaning of the 
object or scene which is its spiritual weight.” 

The search, then, is for the “spiritual weight” of the object, its 
essence, its significance; and for the conveying of that. (I have 
been quoting from Wyndham Lewis in the Vorticist periodical 
Blast.) But there is some haziness about the means, and Vorticist 
paintings and drawings seem only to confuse the issue. Rigidity 
has something to do with their method of painting—(their drawings 
are in general deadly mechanical and unemotional)—and again 
and again they stress the idea of “spiritual weight.” 

As to the Vortex, that seems to have to do with the object itself 
and its seeing rather than with the painter’s mode of expression. 
Lewis writes: “The natural culmination of ‘simultaneity’ is the re- 
formed and imaginatively co-ordinated impression that is seen in a 


Vorticist picture. In Vorticism the direct and hot impressions of 


\ oe 
x 


ON. THE WAY. TO: THE TRENCHES, 
fave CG. 7.R! BWae evra VvLNSON 
135 


life are mated with Abstraction, or the combinations of the Will.” 

Ezra Pound elucidates the thing further. He dismisses Futurism 
as merely “accelerated Impressionism.” He describes Imagism in 
poetry, explaining the Imagist’s direct, absolute and unrelenting ap- 
proach to the “thing,” whether objective or subjective. From that 
he works over to an analogous visual art in Vorticism. “The Vor- 
ticist uses the ‘primary pigment.’ Vorticism is art before it has 
spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary appli- 
cations. . . . Vorticism is an intensive art. . . . The image is not 
an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must 
perforce, call a vortex, from which, and through which, and into 
which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call 
it a vortex. And from this necessity came the name ‘Vorticism.’ ” 
And again Pound defines the vortex as “the point of maximum en- 
ergy, and speaks feelingly of “works of the first intensity.” 

Is it not clear, dear reader? 

Having seen more Vorticist paintings and drawings, perhaps, 
than most of my readers, I may be able to help by venturing a sum- 
mary. It is that the Vorticist believes that there is an absolute 
quality, a spiritual or essential characteristic, in every object; and 
he strives to express this while his emotion over discovering it is 
red-hot; and his means are purged of sentiment, elaboration or 
ornamentation and tend to a special rigidity and machine-like hard- 
ness. The “vortex” is of the object—the “form” in which or out of 
which it is drawn—and the vortex is also the artist’s will, the suc- 
tion, the magnetic quality which pulls to the object or swallows the 
object. But I confess that the hardness often repels me, leaves me 


little sense of formal structure artistically complete. 


136 


MINGRS’ > BAR, BY GEORG GROSZ 


Then I run across a sentence like this in Ezra Pound’s explana- 
tion: “The organization of forms is a much more energetic and 
creative action than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack’’ 
—and I see that the Vorticists really had the key to the modern 
structure. Then I look back at their works and I think that they 
were too muddied up in their own minds to use the key consistently. 
And I end by muttering something like this: Either they didn’t know 
what they were doing, and so aren’t really important, or else they 
actually did see the form-problem as the essential quest but weren’t 
up to truly creative practice, and therefore still aren’t important— 
and anyhow, if they did have that key buried away in a blanket of 
wordiness, they would be Expressionists, and then what’s the use 


of setting themselves off with a special cryptic name like “Vorti- 


137 


iy ee of ‘ SP aN ‘ 
~ aes} ia a; 


PV 


By ky = 
BENG fe a 
60) y r— “7 Oar 
g Kz Lad 
Sa . 
oy a. 
ave 


FACTORIES: BY GEORG (GO 


cists’? I have seen paintings by Lewis that appealed to me as the 
finest Expressionistic things done by an Englishman—very individ- 
ual and very expressive—but how Vorticist I couldn’t see. 

In the War Number of Blast I find the drawing by C. R. W. 
Nevinson entitled On the Way to the Trenches, which is shown a 
few pages back. Nevinson never was unreservedly admitted to the 
Vorticist ranks, and this picture is merely a clever Futuristic illus- 
tration. But when I compare it with the real Vortex goods in the 
publication, it seems to me that the Vorticists’ drawings are equally 
shallow, and not even redeemed by the reflective representative in- 


terest and the cleverness. A drawing by Edward Wadsworth is re- 


138 


produced herewith as typical. There is a suspicion about, that 
Vorticism was the English substitute for the irresponsible movement 
called elsewhere “Dadaism.” There were the same symptoms of 
noise, paradox, and almost incomprehensible “art.” But the Wynd- 
ham Lewis group was never guilty of the perverse, utterly out- 
rageous and cynical deviltries perpetrated by Tristan Tzara, Fran- 
cis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters and their bunch. 

Dadaism was an artistic and literary movement that became a 
sensation in Berlin, Paris and other Continental cities in 1919- 
1920. There is a tendency now to trace the origin to New York, 
on account of the influence of jazz on popular world art. America 
did, indeed, contribute some Dadaish journals before the European 
crop, but these were only feebly nonsensical as compared with later 
developments. Francis Picabia, later chief Dadaist, had been on 
this side, and had been associated with Marcel Duchamp and Man 
Ray in publishing “291.” 

The conception of Dadaism might be traced back to people and 
events long antedating the great war, perhaps to the fin-de-siecle 
generation of Beardsley and Wilde. But the war and its ruins were 
the immediate precipitating cause. Thus M. André Gide, editor 
of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, once exclaimed: “What! While 
our fields, our villages, our cathedrals have suffered so much, our 
language is to remain untouched! It is important that the mind 
should not lag behind matter; it has a right, it too, to some ruins. 
Dada will see to it.” | 

The war fathered the child. Tristan Tzara is generally credited 
with doing the rest. The christening, if not the birth, took place 
in Zurich. In the light of subsequent events, which have probably 


13.9 


outrun even M. Tzara’s anticipations, the name seems to have been 
chosen with uncanny canniness. The original meaning of “Dada” 
in the French is “hobby-horse”; but the associations the word has 
taken on through recurrence as the first spoken syllables of mil- 
lions of generations of infants are rich beyond compare. 

Dadaist “‘art” aims above all else at novelty, sensation, shock. 


” wrote a Paris correspondent of the Christian 


“Dadaist portraits, 
Science Monitor, “‘resemble nothing so much as an old-fashioned 
plate of clam chowder, seen from above.” F. S. Flint once com- 
plained that Dadaist poetry, good or bad, “never says anything—it 
merely makes a noise.” He was reviewing Tzara’s poem begin- 


ning: 


“a e€ ou 0 youyouyou i e ou o youyouyou 
drrrrdrrrrdrrrrgrrrrgrrrrgrrrrrrr 

bits of green duration flutter in my room 
aeoiiiiea ou ii ii belly 

ambran bran bran and restore 

center of the four 


beng bong beng bang .. .” 


Mr. Flint’s comment on M. Tzara’s verse has an application to 
all Dada art: “It has a cachet of its own and its own species of 
unintelligibility. . . . His sincerity is such that he dumps his per- 
sonality in front of the world without reserve or arrangement. He 
shoots it as a scavenger shoots rubbish, and his style is strictly ade- 
quate.” 

There has been, indeed, an overplus of noise and an underplus of 


reserve and arrangement in almost everything accomplished under 


140 


Wate kCOLOR—-TUNIS, BY PAUL KLEE 


the Dada banner. If that were all, we could drop the matter here. 


But one finds an artist like Paul Klee joining the Dada ranks, our 


Ny 


“4 ne 


own Joseph Stella claiming to belong, and a draughtsman like _ 
Georg Grosz turning straight Dada. It is necessary to look deeper. = * 
- There seem to be three explanations of the phenomenon. The — 


first is that all Dadaists are crazy: that their humor is either non- 
sensical or diabolical, their art accidental, their bits of accomplish- 
ment the chance stumblings of the madman. This is the most 
widely-held opinion. After reading a single Dada journal, any 
person prejudiced in favor of sanity will find ample grounds for 


accepting this view. The second and opposite explanation is that 


141 


behind a mask of irresponsibility and humor there stands a cal- 
culating and unlaughing monster; that beyond the apparent pur- 
poselessness there is a deadly serious intelligence, with the ultimate 
aim of undermining civilization by destroying its props—art, cul- 
ture, religion and militarism. 

But there is a third, and to me more plausible, explanation: that 
it is only human for a certain number of people to be crazy, some 
in the way that gets them into “retreats,” others who only occa- 
sionally get “crazy with the heat,” others only as crazy as the aver- 
age artist is; and it is equally human for a lot of other folks to get 
awfully serious, to take culture seriously, to be patriotic, martyrs, 
college professors, etc. And there is a class that combines charac- 
teristics out of both the others. Then there comes a thing like the 
war, that upsets all the values, and a lot of these people get het-up 
to an extraordinary degree. . . . And there emerges a Dada move- 
ment, of which nine-tenths of the manifestations look crazy and 
probably are meant to look crazy; and irreverence shows itself all 
over the place; and behind it are all the incompetents and near- 
thinkers and degenerates and cynics and roisterers who always tag 
on to the “latest” movement, and along with them a few creative 
geniuses, and a little group of disillusioned clear thinkers direct- 
ing the center of the current because they really see that it is neces- 
sary to discredit Bourgeois culture, academic seriousness and de- 
cadent society; who are willing to assume the mask of insanity with 
the real irresponsibles to cloak the laughing but serious purpose of 
reducing to absurdity the pretensions of the Bourgeois elect. 

The war, with its lesson of ghastly futility, accomplished Dadaism 
politically; the ruins, then, must merely be brought into the fields 


142 


of mental activity. The most serious of intellectual achievements 
must be seen as the most horrible—for what would the war have 
been without the refinements of scientific murder, and without the 
blessing and impetus of the learned professions? Destroy the civi- 
lization that begot that horror, scratch the veneer of respectable 
education, show culture its own hypocrisies and dullnesses. As for 
art, use the arts to kill the arts; reduce the intellectualized senti- 
mentalism and “realism” of literature to the infantilism and vul- 
garity which they really are when stripped of their drawing-room 
manners; reduce the pretty imitative activities of contemporary 
painting and design to the puerilities and decadent futilities that 
they basically are. Reduce everything to a welter of meaningless- 
ness, perversion and disorder. Scourge the world, destroy the 
mind, laugh, laugh... . 

When art is ruthlessly reduced to such simple drawings as chil- 
dren or madmen might make, one may perchance run into a new 
naiveté and directness of expression; when literature is reduced to 
a jumble of sounds and random blurts, some Dadaist may turn up 
out of the ruins with the suggestion of an entirely new direction of 
poetry, unhampered by the old laws and conventions. Sometimes 
one even suspects the most avowed Dadaist of consciously creating 
beauty. Thus is the corner turned from destruction to creation, 
from the ridiculous to something esthetically moving. 

Whether Dadaism was conceived as a huge joke or as a cultural 
reign of terror, and whatever its faults, one must recognize that oc- 
casionally the Dadaists turn up an abstract composition that begets 
such a novel reaction, such a fresh emotion, that one forgets all 


the rest—and remembers wearily the sense of futility so often en- 


143 


WOODCUT, 
BY KURT SCHWITTERS 


gendered by a pilgrimage through our official art museums, with 
their miles and miles of descriptive canvases, examples of brilliant 
technique, and pale reflections of the glories of long ago. Perhaps 
we should merely say that the essential Dada thing is mad, cynical, 
futile, irresponsible, hopelessly in love with the paradoxical and the 
bizarre; but that it has drawn into its fold a certain number of 
artists who are recognized as great on both sides of the fence, men 
who have gone over not so much because they admire the madness 
on the other side as because they are sick of the general stupidity in 
regard to the arts on this side. Then it becomes clear that the move- 
ment is trivial, inconsequential and wholly destructive. We will 


claim the few really constructive Dadaists as Cubists or Expression- 


144 


ists—and Dada becomes merely the negative phase, the obverse 
side of the great post-Impressionistic-Expressionistic development. 

The usual Dadaist design is in the nature of a geometrical dia- 
gram-picture which escapes all contact with emotional or esthetic 
experience. I have reproduced Picabia’s portrait of Tzara, as typi- 
cal of Dada representative art. Most of Picabia’s drawings of his 
Dada period look like working-plans such as plumbers or furniture- 
makers might use, with the names of the parts carefully lettered on. 
They have an intellectual interest for the puzzle-minded, and it is 
possible—yes, just possible—that they have an esthetic purpose I 
have not fathomed. 

A chief Dada occupation for a time was the making of pictures 
with all sorts of extraneous objects and substances stuck on: but- 
tons, bits of tin, calico, subway tickets—even spools, wheels, etc., 
etc. Their aim presumably was to achieve abstract design and to 
show that they could do it with any old means. The Cubists had 
done this sort of thing with what appears in Dada company to be re- 
straint. And when an artist like Picasso attempted it, he usually 
made a composition which, if one disregarded the means, had true 
esthetic form and appeal. But the idea seems trivial; simply a 
desire to show the painter’s virtuosity, to prove that he could make 
tasteful arrangements even out of despised materials, a picture out 
of junk. The reproduced “painting” by Kurt Schwitters, the chief 
German Dadaist, is typical. 

To indicate the “infantile” phase of Dadaism at its best—and 
there is true emotional expression here—I have added two drawings 
by Georg Grosz. 


There was a brief flurry a couple of years back about Tatlinism. 


145 


SIINL 11439 


MLUSIONS 


PORTRAIT OF TRISTAN TZARA, 
BY FRANCIS »PLCABID 


This was a movement instigated by an artist named Vladimir Tatlin, 
and was strongest in Russia, although it developed adherents in 
Germany and France. It probably grew out of decadent Cubism of 
the pasted-on-button sort. At any rate it disavowed picture-making 


as such; declared for ‘ 


“constructivism” (and was really a part of 
that constructivist movement of which more will be said in the 
chapters on sculpture) ; and blossomed out with a logic of “contra- 
reliefs,” and a claim of being the true modern art because it got 
its inspiration from the machine-age. It did, indeed, use machine 


materials—steel, glass, armour-plate, wood, cog-wheels, wire, etc. 


146 


otc aIN: b LANyG 5? 
Pere ouen felts GH Wal TD TERS 


-—for its constructions, and it seemed to its practitioners to embody 
the reality of today because the forms of the steel bridge, the 
power-house, the radio, etc., were built into its works. The com- 
plete constructions ran to geometric figures, of which the spiral was 
commonest—so much so that Tatlinism is sometimes taken to mean 
art works designed in spiral form, whether in sculpture, architec- 
ture, costume or what not. 

The drawing shown is Tatlin’s design for a monument to the Third 


Internationale at Moscow. It is meant to be distinctly a “machine 


147 


DESIGN FOR MONUMENT, 
BY Vi GADD M TR. Aiea 


monument,” as distinguished from the outmoded sort of thing in- 
herited from the dead past and still affected by unprogressive na- 
tions (even though their officials ride in motor cars). It is designed 
to be utilitarian as well as esthetically satisfying, supplying every 
public convenience from a radio station to an art gallery. It is 
planned on a huge scale, the height to be one-third greater than that 
148 


of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It has not yet been built, I understand, 
although it is no more progressive than many things sanctioned by 
the very active and intelligent art division of the Soviet government. 

““Synchromism”’ takes us back to the line of development in paint- 
ing which we followed from Impressionism through Cezanne, Cub- 
ism and Futurism. It is likely to have surer place in future art his- 
tories than Vorticism, Dadaism or Tatlinism. The word Synchro- 
mism means simply “with color.” The basic idea advanced by the 
Synchromists is that every color has a physical property which 
makes it, in effect, approach or recede from the eye—yellow, for 
instance, comes forward, while blue tends to run off into space; 
that there is a definite color scale governing the movement of form 
in paintings; and that to paint a receding form yellow or red just 
because the objective thing in nature is yellow or red is a violation 
of a structural truth; and further, that the true and “pure’”’ paint- 
ing of the future will be form composition, without drawing, in ac- 
cordance with this newly discovered color law. 

The history of color in painting began merely in color added to 
drawing for (apparently) realistic value—a green tree green, etc.; 
then it was added for sensuous effect, for ornamental value; then 
it became a source of increased dramatic effect, with the story- 
painters and the realists; finally the Impressionists analyzed nat- 
ural colors and transferred them scientifically (but in all their ac- 
cidentals) to the canvas. Cezanne was the first to use color crea- 
tively as a means to form-expression; and the Synchromists believed 
that they were carrying his work to its final goal, absolute purifica- 
tion of painting, by banishing from their works everything that op- 
posed the physical qualities of color. 


149 


COSMIC SYNCHROMY, 
BY MORGAN RUSSELL 


Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote a standard book on mod- 
erm art, Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning—to which I 
am much indebted—felt so sure that this was a final consummation 
that he led up to “Synchromism” as the crucial chapter of his book. 
He finds in the “abstract coalition of color, form and composition” 
the final phase of the cycle that painting had traveled through all the 
important modernists from Delacroix and Turner to Cezanne and 
the Cubists. He saw, in the Synchromists’ color orchestration of all 


tones from black to white, the means of the painter resolved to a 


150 


medium without hazard. An exhibition in Paris of the works of 
S. Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, two Americans of Euro- 
pean training, and the leading exponents of Synchromism, led Wil- 


lard Huntington Wright to say: 


There were human figures distorted almost out of recognition for the 
compositional needs of the canvas and painted in bars of pure color; 
still-lifes which seemed to be afire with chromatic brilliance; fantastic 
fruits; life-sized male figures in pure yellow-orange; and mountains of 
intense reds and purples, warm greens and violets. All the pictures, how- 
ever, displayed decided organizational ability, and they possessed a more 
complete harmony of color and line than had been achieved by any of the 
other younger painters. . . 

- They desired to express, by means of color, form which would be as 
complete and as simple as a Michelangelo drawing, and which would give 
subjectively the same emotion of form that the Renaissance master gives 
objectively. They wished to create images of such logical structure that 
the imagination would experience their unrecognizable reality in the same 
way our eyes experience the recognizable realities of life. They strove to 
bring about a new and hitherto unperceived reality which would be as 
definite and moving as the commonplace realities of every day, in short, 
to find an abstract statement for life itself by the use of forms which had 
no definable aspects. The Synchromists’ chief technical method of obtain- 
ing this abstract equivalent for materiality was to make use of the inherent 
and absolute movement of colors toward and away from the spectator, by 
placing colors on forms in exact accord with the propensities of those 
colors to approach or recede from the eye... . 

With their knowledge of the fundamentals of rhythmic organization, 
which is well in advance of that of the other painters of today, their 
progress seems assured. Their postulates are too definite to permit of 
the introduction of literary or musical transcendentalism; and their apports 


are too significant to permit of any retrogression toward metaphysics or 


151 


drama. Their palette has become co-ordinated and rationalized. Their 
composition is founded on the human body in movement. And their color, 
in its plastic sense, takes into consideration space, light and form. These 
factors represent their technical assets. With these painters comes into 
being an art divorced from all the entanglements of photography, of 
piecemeal creation, of inharmonic gropings, of literature and of data 


hunting. 


A year or two later, when these artists had actually turned (for a 
time) to abstract composition, Morgan Russell wrote as follows 
about the picture here reproduced: “My first synchromies repre- 
sented a personal manner of visualizing by color rhythms; hence 
my treatment of light by multiple rainbow-like color-waves which, 
expanding into larger undulations, form the general composition. 
In my next step I was concerned with the elimination of the natural 
object and with the retention of color rhythms. An example of this 
period is the Cosmic Synchromy. ‘The principal idea in this can- 
vas is a spiralic plunge into space, excited and quickened by appro- 
priate color contrasts. . . . While there will probably always be 
illustrative pictures, it cannot be denied that this century may see 
the flowering of a new art of forms and colors alone. Personally, 
I believe that non-illustrative painting is the purest manner of 
esthetic expression, and that, provided the basic demands of great 
composition are adhered to, the emotional effect will be even more 
intense than if there was present the obstacle of representation. 
Color is form; and in my attainment of abstract form I use those 
colors which optically correspond to the spatial extension of the 
forms desired.” 

I am reproducing also—although the reader is warned how in- 


complete Synchromist pictures are without color—Macdonald- 


152 


Diawiivwea TION 5, BY S. MACDONALD-WRIGHT 


Wright’s Organization 5. The painter writes: “I strive to make my 
art bear the same relation to painting that polyphony bears to 
music. Illustrative music is a thing of the past; it has become ab- 
stract and purely esthetic, dependent for its effect upon rhythm and 
form. Painting, certainly need not lag behind music.” 

Both Macdonald-Wright and Russell have recently reverted to 
some sort of vague and incidental representation of natural forms. 
That gives weight, perhaps, to my own opinion that any formula in 
art creation, even when it embraces so important a step forward in 
scientific knowledge of materials, is likely to prove deadening to 
its practitioners if they follow it academically, intellectually, abso- 
lutely. (The same criticism applies to Jay Hambridge’s widely 


discussed discovery of a formula of “dynamic symmetry.”’) 


153 


The name Synchromy—“with color’”—leaves out as much as it 
embraces. It may mark a further scientific step toward one phase 
of the thing Cezanne was groping for instinctively. But it leaves 
more than mere improvisation to be accomplished. If this is to 
remain painting, it must have a foundation in composition, in or- 
ganization. What of structure that we talked so much about a while 
back? That is obviously where the very inventive Synchromists 
lacked. Perhaps it is lack of the structure—perhaps Vortex!—of 
natural forms (which has little to do with outward aspects) which 
nullifies so much of the effort toward abstract painting. Let us give 
the Synchromists their due, and say that they put important knowl- 
edge into the hands of all painters; but let us plunge ahead into the 


muddy waters of pure abstraction itself. 


WOODCUT, BY KANDINSKY 


IX 


THE SWING TOWARD 
ABSTRACTION 


¢ 
- 


IMPRESSION—MOSCOW, BY KANDINSKY 


HIS painting obviously is not true to nature. It distorts and 
mixes up whatever objects in Moscow inspired it. The pho- 
tographic function of painting has here been minimized, and what- 
ever is of value in the picture is of some different esthetic order. 
The artist has, in truth, been travelling toward abstraction. 
Abstraction in art may best be defined negatively, as the lack 
of representative form. It involves absolute composition (as in 


music)—composition which neither imitates nor suggests objective 


Ee 


forms. Abstract painting or sculpture never provides a transcrip- 
tion. It is the negation of the concrete, the material, the outwardly 
real. 

We have already seen how the Synchromists moved toward the 
abstract in the limited field of isolated color. Building on the fu- 
sion of color and drawing in Cezanne, and the scientific truths of the 
Neo-Impressionists, they took what they considered the final step 
toward the purification of painting. But having arrived at a com- 
plete knowledge of the physical properties of color—a mode of or- 
chestration, qualities of projection and recession, etc.—and thus 
being theoretically able to create in a free and absolute way, they 
found something lacking, a structural element missing, and they 
turned back to at least a speaking acquaintanceship with nature. 

Through the hundred years (from Turner, Constable and Dela- 
croix to the Synchromists) when color was progressing toward this 
purification, a similar progression was to be noted in another ele- 
ment. Compositional form was moving gradually but surely to- 
ward abstraction. For convenience I am doing violence to my own 
terminology here, and including in “compositional form” all the 
factors entering into the organization of a painting aside from 
color: subject matter, line, composition in the rhythm and balance 
sense, chiaroscuro (light and shade composition). I have noted at — 
intervals in the last four chapters how changes in this compositional 
form tended progressively toward distortion, suppression and 
finally elimination of the representative element. 

Drawing had been held to an imitative function, to transcription, 
almost throughout the centuries-long realistic era. The objective 


forms of nature were arranged according to a few elementary rules 


158 


of composition and by an instinctive feeling for organization on the 
part of the artist. Giotto, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, El Greco may 
have widened the conception of compositional form, or struck be- 
yond its generally understood functions, but the naturalistic or 
imitative limitation still held generally down to the 19th Century. 
With Cezanne the representative element was first decisively modi- 
fied; distortion entered. With the Cubists, who are even more 
clearly concerned in this progression because they renounced color, 
we reach the stage of almost complete elimination of representative 
forms. The next step is abstraction. 

It is almost impossible to state any theory of the abstract in art 
without recourse to the terminology and the parallel of music. For 
music is a wholly non-representative art based in its physical aspect 
on certain widely understood phenomena. The goal of the abstract 
painters is an art of color as free from associative and objective 
interest as is this other art of sound. There is no more reason, 
argue the abstractionists, why painting should be dependent upon 
the depiction or suggestion of natural objects than there is for 
music to be dependent upon likeness to natural sounds. Painting 
must be stripped of the trivial and extraneous elements that give 
rise to the pleasures typical of drama, anecdote, photography, etc. 

Many artists have felt this truth, and the timid experiments have 
been myriad. But the story of abstraction in modern painting is 
popularly and legitimately centered in the life-work of one man: 
Vasily Kandinsky. He is today the world’s foremost practitioner 
of a visual art wholly divorced from material actuality, and the 
most lucid theorist of the movement. His theory, to be sure, is 


shaped by an extraneous religious outlook on life, for he is a the- 


159 


osophist. It is limited to a spiritual vision which seems to some of 
us to ignore certain physical facts of art creation. But he is the 
greatest figure of the pioneer swing toward abstraction. 

Kandinsky was born in Moscow, and was Russian-trained. Later 
he went to Munich to study, and has ever since been associated with 
the modernist movement in German art. From his early German 
days we hear echoes of his obsession with composition, with color 
orchestration, with memory-painting, although his work up to 1908 
was marked by nothing more radical than a posteresque simplifica- 
tion. In 191] he and Franz Marc, with two or three others, formed 
the famous “Blaue Reiter” group. His art reached maturity at 
about that time, and he has been a world influence ever since. 

In 1910 there was published Kandinsky’s book On the Spiritual 
Element in Art (published in an English translation in 1914 as “The 
Art of Spiritual Harmony”). His theory of painting had already 
set definitely toward abstract means, although he hesitated to com- 
mit himself wholly. 

Kandinsky argues the case for his sort of abstraction as follows: 
Painting has become materialistic, and the great mass of contem- 
porary painters are merely opportunists. Art should, however, be 
nothing more than an expression of the spirituality in man. Ce- 
zanne showed the beginning of a new way. Matisse followed it 
but got lost in the seductiveness of color, the French love for color- 
decoration; Picasso was important too, but he got lost in a scholar’s 
search for form. Kandinsky feels that color and form are physical 
means and only incidental—the expression of the artist’s inner 
life is the thing. 


Not only color and form, but the third, combining element, com- 


160 


Pee ROVISATION, BY KANDINSKY 


position, “must be decided only by a corresponding vibration in 
the human soul.” There is so much stressing of this “vibration in 
the human soul” in the book, that one marks that as Kandinsky’s 
major source of creation. It determines certain “‘combinations of 
veiled and fully expressed appeals,” which presumably are impro- 
vised from a multiplicity of colors and forms: 

“The adaptability of forms, their organic but inward variations, 
their motion in the picture, their inclination to material or abstract, 
their mutual relations, either individually or as parts of a whole; 
further, the concord or discord of the various elements of a pic- 
ture, the handling of groups, the combinations of veiled and openly 


expressed appeals, the use of rhythmical or unrhythmical, of geo- 


161 


metrical or non-geometrical forms, their contiguity or separation— 
all these things are material for counterpoint in painting. . . . 

“Painting is an art, and art is not vague production, transitory 
and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improve- 
ment and refinement of the human soul—to, in fact, the raising of 
ihe spiritual triangle. . . . That is beautiful which is produced by 
the inner need, which springs from the soul.” 

The implication is clear: art must be cleansed of what is material. 
There is no talk of an absolute esthetic quality which is the essen- 
tial thing sought by the artist. Kandinsky does not renounce imita- 
tiveness for that search. When he mentions an element of “pure 
artistry’ (beyond personality and style), it is only to repeat that 
that too must arise out of “the inner need.” Always it is the inner 
need that is the source of all good art. Out of it one must develop 
his melodic and symphonic compositions as carefully as one must 
order his deeds, thoughts and feelings in life—to do otherwise 
would be to make bad “karma.” We are painfully close to the 
preacher and the schoolmaster here. 

Such an approach to art, sincere and purified though it is, leads 
to the substitution of a certain amount of mystery, mysticism and 
mood for those hard, simple, definite qualities which most signifi- 
cant modern artists have sought. Thus we find that Kandinsky 
works largely with what may be called the “mood values” of color. 
“Blue is the typical Heavenly color.” It stands for rest; blue- 
black for grief, and violet for the echo of grief. White is a preg- 
nant silence, black a dead silence. “Green is the Bourgeoisie—self- 
satisfied, immovable, narrow.” And so on. This is a reversion to 


symbolism—interesting enough in itself, but not on the high-road 


162 


DRAWING BY HELEN TORR 


to creation. The artist finds, of course, a musical equivalent for 
each of these color values. 

In his paintings there is a softness that belongs essentially to 
mood composition. His early pictures had titles. By 1910 he had 
adopted a system of dividing his canvases into three groups: Im- 
pressions, Improvisations and Compositions. He has not adhered 
strictly and exclusively to this classification, but it has served to 
label the greater bulk of his paintings. The picture at the head of 
the chapter is an “Impression.” The representative element is 
fairly definite still, although it is obvious that the artist is more in- 


terested in form-composition. The next reproduction is an “Im- 


163 


provisation.” Representation has almost disappeared. The pic- 
ture opposite is a “Composition.” Representation has been com- 
pletely renounced. 

Kandinsky has written of his three methods of work: “They rep- 
resent three different sources of inspiration: (1) A direct impres- 
sion of outward nature, expressed in purely artistic form. This I 
call an ‘Impression.’ (2) A largely unconscious spontaneous ex- 
pression of inner character, the non-material nature. This I call 
an ‘Improvisation.’ (3) An expression of a slowly formed inner 
feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing. This 
I call a ‘Composition.’ In this, reason, consciousness, purpose, 
play an overwhelming part. But of the calculation nothing appears, 
only the feeling.” 

Two questions arise immediately when one studies the three sorts 
of picture together. Does the artist ever escape objective or asso- 
ciative interest entirely, either in his own mind or in the mind of the 
spectator? And are his most satisfying works those farthest re- 
moved from representation? Before attempting to answer, it is 
only just to say that everything Kandinsky does is likely to be pleas- 
ing in color in the decorative surface way. He minimizes in his 
writings the value of this sensuous effect—but it is the first thing 
that charms and holds the spectator who otherwise would be re- 
pelled by the lack of imitative or literary values in his pictures. 

The Impression shown is clearly representative in origin. The 
Improvisation No. 30, like many another in this group, exhibits 
somewhere imitative values. This is so true that Kandinsky him- 
self has called it informally “the cannon picture.” He wrote to the 


owner, the late Arthur Jerome Eddy: “The designation ‘Cannons’ 


164 


SoeMoe Ost tt ON, oBY KAN DINS KY 


selected by me for my own use, is not to be conceived as indicating 
the ‘contents’ of the picture. These contents are indeed what the 
spectator lives or feels while under the effect of the form and color 
combinations of the picture. This picture is nearly in the shape 
of across. . . . The presence of the cannons in the picture could 
probably be explained by the constant war talk that had been 
going on throughout the year... .” Later he writes, “The ob- 
server must learn to look at a picture as a graphic representation of 
a mood and not as a representation of objects.” 

Here there is clearly representative means. The painter has not 
evaded them, but he tries to explain them away as sub-conscious 


on his part, and as something which the spectator should overlook. 


165 


PAINTING BY "GEO R'G-) MAG 


But the third picture, the Composition No. 5, has in it no object that 
we can name. One might make a game of finding approximate 
representative forms there, but the eye that is not overtrained to 
seek imitation first will not be seduced so shallowly. The question 
then is, do these purely abstract pictures give rise to deeper es- 
thetic pleasure than the partly representative pictures? 

Judging only from Kandinsky’s own work, I should say that they 
do not. In general there is a wandering, soft, unstructural quality 
about them which seems to me to be a denial of something impor- 
tant to painting. They may be pure transcriptions of spiritual 
meanderings, and perhaps we shall find that such things speak to 
us as we grow more spiritual. But at present I feel that this does 
not appeal to me (outside its color charm) as anything else than a 


166 


vague transcription of human mood, to which I must be personally 
attuned at the moment of seeing the painting. If I happen to be in 
a veiled Maeterlinckian mood, I am charmed; on other days I 
have no more than a passing interest. 

Perhaps this is art for the esoteric mind, for the dabbler into 
metaphysics. But that is putting art on the plane of an intellectual 
exercise. It admits of no such thing as a real esthetic emotion. 
Until the psycho-analysts and the spiritualists dig deeper, we must 
discount the mystical element. 

What is it, then, that the abstract painter probably needs out 
of nature—at least until his creative powers are more developed 
than at present? It is in some sense structure. His present com- 
positions are at best spineless, at worst chaotic. They lack “form” 
in the structural and voluminous sense. Perhaps this element is 
recognizable emotionally only when associated with naturally or 
humanly built forms. The sense of weight, poise, organization, 
must perhaps have a vaguely associative origin in something mathe- 
matical or stable or palpable. Form thus becomes significant when 
it speaks of a quality of force or direction or movement. 

The element in music which is lacking here is movement in time. 
Profound musical structure lies in the melodic and contrapuntal 
rather than the harmonic elements. Kandinsky’s paintings may be 
perfect in harmony, but he has little claim to use the words “me- 
lodic” and “symphonic” in reference to his work. His painting 
is comparable rather to a chord in music. 

Movement added to what Kandinsky has would lead us into the 
field of mobile color. Everything that he claims is possible there, 


as Thomas Wilfred has shown us; but that is not the art of painting. 


167 


“ 
op 


Lacking sequential movement, it is probabie that painting must 
get back to structure in the Cezanne sense, or to poised movement, 
as it lives in his canvases. Harmonization in color is not enough. 
So far no one has shown us that improvisation in color and spirit- 
form suffices. 

It is probable that Kandinsky realizes the structural lack in his 
painting. His work since 1920 exhibits more of lines and planes 
placed from edge to edge of the canvas. There is more of con- 
centricity, angularity and suggested interpenetration, and not a 
little suggestion of Cubistic flatness. But it has only been a move- 
ment toward the less profound Cubist ideals. If there has been 
any significant shifting, it has been away from mere prettiness and 
daintiness; it has approached decorative flatness but has made 
no gain toward structural voluminous form—toward a deeper 
expressiveness. 

Kandinsky’s follower, Rudolf Bauer, who also works “musi- 
cally,’ seems to me to produce pictures curiously like what I 
imagine my insides (physical, not spiritual) to be. They (the 
pictures) would serve well as decorations for a doctor’s office. 
Nell Walden’s abstract designs approach pattern-making. I think 
our silk manufacturers have stolen freely from her, much to their 
enrichment. But hers are not paintings in the beyond-decoration 
sense. Georg Muche adds something of Redon’s delicate grada- 
tions to the surface of his canvas, and he seems to hint at deeper 
qualities. But he hints through cryptic-suggestive forms that 
might be swimming spheres or cyclones or harlequin suits. Like- 
wise in America the abstract arrangements of “rhythm and form” 


of Andrew Dasburg, and many of the synchromatic organizations 


168 


of Morgan Russell and Macdonald-Wright seem to contain veiled 
allusions to other worlds. They all lack structural substance. 
Almost any painting of any one of these artists would be an excel- 


lent starting point for one of Wilfred’s compositions in mobile 


MOVEMENT, 
BY MARSDEN HARTLEY 


color; but he would substitute movement—development—for the 
element they lack within their static frames 

Perhaps it is merely that the giant of abstract creation has not 
yet arrived. Perhaps someone will bring architectonics into it. 
At present the lover of modernist art is in the paradoxical position 
where he likes the painter who strictly subordinates imitation to a 
hidden non-representational element, but finds unsatisfying the 


painter who goes over to non-representation entirely, attempting to 
169 


ROCKS AND SEA, MAINE, BY JOH NIE eG 


create in abstract form. Certainly most of us appreciate Kandin- 
sky’s Impressions and Improvisations, and such things as his Winter 

page 109), more than we do the Compositions. And yet—I con- 
fess that I have moments of wobbling on the questicn. I find 


170 : 


Weaver Ok—OPUS 120, 1918, BY PAUL. KLEE 


something coming into the abstract work of certain Americans— 
particularly Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Torr—which is emotion- 
ally very moving. 

There is a place where abstract painting borders on abstract 
decoration. Purely sensuous values are more easily obtained 
than structural ones from non-representative material. From 
Claude Bragdon’s higher-mathematical architectural ornament to 
the Matisse sort of painted decorative panel, there is a wide range 
of achievement in modern art that is hardly equalled outside of 
Persian or other Oriental history. Perhaps the sensuous impression 
afforded by an absolute decoration is a sort of first dimension of 


the deeper ecstasy that is afforded by a picture indubitably rich in 


171 


voluminous form. At any rate I am one who would give place to 
the “decorative movement” in the histories of modern art, if only 
because the decorative ideal is a step closer to what we are after 
than was anything revered in the long realistic era. I add a deco- 
rative painting by Marsden Hartley to supply material for your 
further thought about this—remembering too that Hartley has a 
clearer understanding of the extra-dimensional quality in painting 
than almost any other American—excepting John Marin and 
Walt Kuhn. 

Marin has given me more pure esthetic enjoyment than anything 
I have ever seen of Kandinsky’s. He stops just short of abstraction. 
Very few painters dare go so far toward it. Cezanne did in his 
watercolors. In them he seems to bare his painter’s soul more 
easily than he did in oils. Look back to page 99, and to Marin’s 
painting on page 35. These things register the high-water mark 
reached in sheer creation by the modernist painters. There is 
in them more of the essential artist himself and more of the 
essence of painting. It is intensified expression in the subjective 
sense and in truth to medium. And it borders on abstraction. 

I have put opposite each other here the Rocks and Sea by Marin 
and one of Paul Klee’s whatnots (Opus 120, 1918). Marin wrote 
once, in connection with this painting: “These works are meant 
as constructed expressions of the inner senses, responding to things 
seen and felt. . . . In all things there exists the central power, the 
big force, the big movement; and to this central power all the 
smaller factors have relation.” Out of that attitude grows a paint- 
ing like this. It seems to me a safer approach to abstraction than 
Kandinsky’s spirit-guidance. Then, as if to prove to us how little 


172 


fee oeHLCKR SALE, BY, FERANZ MARC 


subject has to do with the problem, Klee follows with his children’s 
block picture and lands at almost the same place ezsthetically— 
though less intensely. 

Klee and Franz Marc gained much from close intimacy with 
Kandinsky, and assimilated his ideas. But both were strong enough 
to remain individual, and both retained a modicum of the repre- 
sentative element—although Marc had come very close to abstrac- 
tion just before his death. Klee can put the slightest thing on 
his canvas or paper and it comes out a palpitating picture—although 
the imitative and subject interest may seem to be a child’s naive 
scratching. Marc puts his beloved animals into his consciousness, 


filters them through some abstract conception and they turn out an 


1a) 


emotional expression—but with at least a remaining reminiscence 
of the originals. That is about as far as the creative use of 
abstraction has really gone. And yet the ideal of abstraction 


somehow seems to underlie the whole modern art movement. 


LAMPSHADE ~“BYo MAN RAW 


174 


X 


Nh sel ee Wngd het OD 
MOBILE COLOR 


i? =e . i 
. ; 
‘ 
¥ ; wha 
j j 
an 
5 
A *. 
t 
< é 
. 
‘ 
5 
, , " A 
-* eet On ’ 
b . 
a” Su 
‘ 
i x 
2 ; a 
. 
‘ # 
= 
. 
Oar - e . 
é ‘ 
“ 
* 
e © 
j 
\ 
‘ 
. * ’ 
b 
, 
. 2 
5 2 


NE cannot properly speak of a modernist movement in the art 

of mobile color. The whole art as we have it is practically 

a development of the last decade: all there is of it is modern. But 
since my interpretation of typical modernism is built largely on 
the hypothesis that there is an epochal shift from obsession with 
representation to the search for expressive qualities, there is a 


special appropriateness in the inclusion of a chapter about this. 


new and purely abstract art of light. It answers, moreover, the ~~ 


ultimate question which musi be asked by those modernist painters. . 
who are tempted to abandon the anchor in objectivity and “compose _ 
absolutely.”” Every one of them has found that when he gave up © 
the materials for structure and organization in his canvases, there 
was need for some other element beyond color harmonies and 
structureless color-form. The answer is that he then needs move: 
ment—movement in time. And when he has gained that, his art 
l:as ceased to be painting, has become mobile color. 

Doubtless for centuries people have dreamed of an art of colors 
not only combined harmoniously but flowing in melodious suc- 
cession. Many have guessed the possibilities of an art of broken-up 
light no less fruitful of beauty than music, no less abstract, no less 
productive of ecstasy. But there was no means of liberating this 
potential art of flowing color-form until electricity was fairly 
conquered. (Certain sentimental art-lovers will wince at the idea 


of anything so modern as an electric machine acting as instrument 


eT 


—the long-ago-and-far-away romanticists and classicists—but for 
reassurance one need only remember that the “purest” of the arts, 
music, is the most mathematical.) 

There were already experiments making certain the ultimate 
fulfillment of the vision, before Thomas Wilfred built his color 
organ, which he calls the Clavilux, here in America a few years 
back. But Wilfred has for the first time constructed a machine 
so capable and so flexible that one is able to forget completely 
that there is any mechanical element involved; is able to sit in 
an “auditorium” and see this new art of visions and dreams come 
true. For already one accepts a composition in mobile color as 
freely as music, with the mind quiescent, the emotions responsive, 
the world well forgotten. 

No one supposes, I think, that Thomas Wilfred has all at once 
and at the first leap become a master of composition in this new 
art. Color composers of the future are likely to look back and 
feel somewhat contemptuous of the simple things he is playing 
for us today. They perhaps will be seen to correspond to the 
simple folk tunes of primitive peoples. Orchestral works will be 
a later development; the elements of contrapuntal composition are 
as yet but vaguely conceived. But the point is that already one 
experiences moments of such poignant beauty, and sustained pe- 
riods of such intense emotional responsiveness, that one does not 
question, speculate or prophesy. This simply is the thing itself— 
disarming the mind, speaking to the spirit. 

Let me tell as nearly as possible what I saw when I went to 
Wilfred’s “trial theatre” at Huntington, Long Island. (I have 


heard that when an adapted Clavilux came to a New York theatre, 


178 


the result was not at all the same, the conditions of the “throw’’ 
not being right.) Imagine, please, a small company of us seated 
at the back of a dimly-lighted theatre. We seemed to be looking 
out toward a wall of darkness, an effect that was further intensified 
when the last bit of overhead light gradually faded out. In front 
something moved away, so that one became conscious not of a 
dark wall but of a dark space—as if one were looking into a 
blackened camera-box of enormous dimensions. 

The actual beginnings of the “composition” came when shreds 
of color floated in—at what distance, a few feet or miles away, one 
could not guess—taking form, shifting, unfolding, building up 
into mighty movements, dropping away to faint playings-about, but 
always mixed in space. In that is the first great surprise for one 
who has more or less foreseen mobile color: in the fact that it 
appears not on a sheet or wall, but plastically, as space composition 
in color rather than painting in color, as an interpenetrating, space 
art rather than an imposed two-dimensional art. In the seeing, 
right there all previous expectations are surpassed, as if, for 
instance, one who had foreseen the art of music in a mere succession 
of beautiful sounds had come upon it instead in the greater fulness 
of harmonic compositions. 

How long one of the color pieces takes in the playing, I do not 
know. But four of them seem to make up a complete enough 
concert program. Each of the four I saw was marked by a dis- 
tinctive quality of theme, and within this there was complex variety 
of form, movement, hues and values, accompaniment, etc. One 
remembers certain themes as stately, slow-moving, turning in on 


themselves; others as bright, quick, tender—colors at play; still 


179 


others, perhaps, as oversweet, sentimental, pretty. And yet through 
them all ran a dignity and a directness of appeal and a sense of 
unity that left no doubt that here was the beginning of one of the 
great arts of the world. One had that feeling of detachment, of 
ecstasy, which is a response only to the most solemn religious or 
esthetic experience. 

It is almost impossible to describe any one composition because 
no words have been invented to convey the ideas of color-form in 
movement. But in general a single color (hue) and its shape, 
thrown into the stage space at the start, establish the theme, and 
the first large movement is the beginning of a series that varies in 
contrast, balance, parallel and repetition. The beginning may 
show a bulb of color floating down into sight, constantly changing, 
seldom without a harmonious accompaniment of surrounding 
colors: it falls, turns, unfolds, folds again, fades away in two 
directions, gathers itself, glows into brilliancy, floats up almost 
into blackness, glows a moment and disappears; suddenly the 
faintest beginnings of two similar bulbs come from nowhere, 
become brilliant, repeat the turnings, foldings, fadings, disappear- 
ance; then the original bulb returns, composed in other hues and 
repeats the movement; and so on to other variations within the 
same composition. 

Sometimes the shapes are too elusive to be named. One becomes 
conscious of a sea of dull color, into which a solo color or groups 
of colors swim slowly and silently, change in hue and values, float 
lazily, form the most enchanting enveloping veils of light, fade, 
grow momentarily brilliant, disappear again on the surface of the 


sea. Often these shapeless movements seem on the verge of taking 


180 


FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR, 
poy SPO MPA S. WW LIGk RED 


tangible form, but always when they seem about to resolve into 
“fioures” they float back into vague mistiness. 

The purely atmospheric effects prove in general less stirring 
than what might be called the more structural pieces. A domi- 
nating form seems necessary to stir the emotions to the point where 
one just naturally throws off every restraint and memory, and 
revels in the pure joy of emotional reaction. This form may be 
something that looks geometrical, such as a triangular or conical 
tower of light, or an oval, or three circles intertwined; or it may 
be cloud-like, or like two huge screens constantly turning over and 


unfolding, or mere flashes or perhaps planets. Sometimes it is 


18f 


FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE CODTOR, 
BY THOMAS WILFRED 


luminous, giving off light, and again it seems merely to reflect 
light—a distinction which may hold the clue to one of the problems 
of composition: how to keep a motive dominant and its accompani- 
ment subdued. I retain the definite impression of solo colors or 
solo figures moving throughout in the midst of an accompaniment 
of harmonious colors, but never lost in that accompaniment. 

As to the actual colors, their range surpasses anything that the 
lover of color could imagine just from seeing paintings and mosaics, 
studying color charts, or experimenting in the usual channels. 
Perhaps only those of us who have had to do with stage lighting, 


and have watched in rehearsals the accidental effects produced 


182 


hrORMs PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR, 
BY 27 OMAS. WILE RED 


through a particularly flexible switchboard and equipment, could 
have guessed a fraction of the miracle of which colored lights are 
capable. The inventor of the Clavilux has brought these effects 
and gradations under control in a way that makes the best stage 
switchboard seem crude and inexpressive by comparison. Whether 
he has a scientific color formula or not, I do not know, but in all 
the compositions he played I cannot remember the slightest sugges- 
tion of a color discord. 

I remember especially certain pale greens, apparently lit up 
with warmer colors underneath; a specially beautiful deep blue (for 


which I have often searched in vain among pigments and fabrics) ; 


183 


grays that have lost their dullness; stains of red that shaded from 
the intensest of centers to borders of orange and violet; and a virgin 
white become glowingly alive and interesting by contrast. But it is 
in the constantly changing gradations and harmonies that the marvel 
really lies. The number of hues must literally run into millions— 
or infinity. 

The complexity of considerations must be a challenge to any 
venturesome artist. There is, first, the matter of hues, or color- 
tints; and beyond that the matter of color’s lightness or darkness, 
its values (a resource without counterpart in music, I believe) ; and 
beyond that again the matter of intensity. Then follows the ques- 
tion of form, the shape or figure of the light, which is capable of 
as many millions more of differences. And then harmony, the 
juxtaposition of harmonious hues, values, intensities; and paral- 
leling and contrasting forms. And to make it all alive, infinitely 
multiplying the variations and harmonies, there is movement, add- 
ing color melody and orchestration. Is it any wonder that the 
keyboard of the Clavilux looks to the uninitiated like sixteen piano 
playboards banked up in a half-circle and all asking to be played 
at once? 

It is too soon to attempt to build up a particularized theory for 
the art of mobile color; but this much may be said at the outset: 
it must be, like music, an abstract art. It will have a formal beauty 
of its own sort, distinctive, shaped by the limitations and possi- 
bilities of its medium, colored lights. But it will not ever (let us 
hope) get mixed up with the aim of representing nature. It would 
then—awful thought—become a sort of super-colored movie. As 


in music, where only the cheapest novelties of composition try 


184 


definitely to imitate the sounds of nature, so in this new art there 
will be no effort to suggest objective reality. 

The color organ, like the sound organ, plays compositions that 
are tender and plaintive, or stirring and stately, or light and 
playful; for it seems almost impossible to separate any esthetic 


experience from such associations of “feeling,” 


which are, after 
all, to some extent recognitional. I may even add further, in 
fairness to those who are partisan to representative art, that of those 
few people who had seen the mobile color recital, and to whom I 
put the question, every one admitted having discovered almost 
recognizable objects at various points—though each one said that 
he supposed that he “had read them into” the forms presented. 
At times some of the forms seemed to me about to take the shape 
of gigantic human or celestial figures. Again the accompaniment 
to a long movement seemed like blowing curtains, constantly pulling 
out and away from the center of light. And once I am sure that 
there floated up and out of the central pool of color and away to 
the wings two golden-brown loaves of Mother’s Best Bread. These, 
however, were the let-down moments of the program. 

The inventor of the color organ—I might better say, perhaps, 
the present inventor—is Thomas Wilfred, a young Danish-Ameri- 
can artist who has been experimenting in the field of color for four- 
teen years. He has been poet, designer, theatre artist and musician. 
But that would hardly explain the marvels of his instrument. It 
happens that he counts among his assets also a genius for electrical 
and mechanical engineering. This new art can flower only out of 
an intricate electrical machine, and Wilfred has been inventive 


enough both to create the machine and to get beyond any suggestion 


185 


of its mechanics in the exhibited result. This is his third instru- 
ment. While necessarily it cannot be fully explained at present— 
patents are pending, I suppose—this much may be said freely: 
The colors are projected as electric-light rays controlled through 
a keyboard somewhat similar to that of a church organ. One set 
of keys controls the color as such, another controls intensity, and a 
third controls movement. The forms are varied by means of “me- 
diums,” prisms or lenses through which the lights are projected. 
The effect of space instead of screen is achieved through the use 
of a background that is a modification of the theatrical stage-dome 
or cupola-horizon, in place of a sheet or flat wall. 

I have used many musical terms and musical analogies. Thomas 
Wilfred is particularly insistent, however, that this new art be 
considered on its own merits and within the limits of its own 
media, and that music be left out of the question. His attitude is 
doubtless in part a reaction to the famous attempts of Scriabin to 
add a colored-light accompaniment to orchestral music, based on 
a supposed scientific correspondence of sound waves and light 
waves. Even should such an art of combined abstract sound and 
abstract color develop, it would be a bastard art like opera, where 
good music is constantly interrupted by bad (or rarely good) 
acting, staging, etc. Other color organs, like Rimington’s, throwing 
colored lights on screens, have also been based on theories of 
musical notation. 

Wilfred’s approach seems the wiser one, for it forestalls a limi- 
tation of mobile color through a supposed rigid “scale.” It leaves 
the field for invention absolutely open, subject only to the limits 


inherent in the nature of its medium. And yet there remains the 


186 


illuminating fact that Wilfred himself is a professional musician. 

Mobile color has special advantages over other arts. There is 
something reposeful beyond words in the conditions of seeing it— 
in absolute darkness and silence. I imagine that people who like 
music but are bothered by the noise of it are going to hail mobile 
color joyously. I found in it, too, something of that quality which 
is so hard to describe, which metaphysicians call the fourth dimen- 
sion. In the projection of this art in space I sensed a new di- 
mension, a new direction. It reminds me to say that with Thomas 
Wilfred there stands, as leader in the development of an art of 
mobile color, Claude Bragdon, long known as architect, writer, 
stage designer, and fourth-dimensional theorist—and to some of 
us as experimenter in color-art. His organ, designed on a prin- 
ciple fundamentally different from Wilfred’s, was at last reports 
stored away, unfinished, awaiting more auspicious days for com- 
pletion. In the meantime still others, including the Synchromist 
leader Macdonald-Wright, are turning their inventive faculties 
and their passion for color toward the development of other 
instruments. 

One can only guess at the future of this art, and wonder. Wil- 
fred looks forward to the building of other organs and the training 
of color-organists. He sees the time when composers will bring 
him scores, perhaps first submitting sketch drawings of the primary 
theme, with notation of possible rhythms and accompaniment. The 
time will doubtless come when a bank of organs will be manipu- 
lated by a group of players, one carrying a solo part, perhaps, and 
the others an orchestral accompaniment—for the present linsitations 


of the Clavilux arise largely from the organist’s lack of more than 


187 


the two hands God gave him. Other vistas open—marvels only 
surmised and emotional responses only vaguely and sub-consciously 
sensed in the past. But this much is sure: here is the beginning, or 
at least the first serious achievement, of an art as primitive, as 
complex, as capable of varied emotional beauty as music; and its 
medium is light—that light which was the earliest god of human- 
kind, which to this day typifies all that is spiritual, joy-bringing 
and radiant. Perhaps, then, this is the beginning of the greatest, 


the most spiritual and radiant art of all. 


MUSIC—BLACK, BLUE AND GREEN, 
BY GEORGIA Or REE PEE 


188 


"ah 


XI 


EXPRESSIONISM 


% 


MANE ——bHE SATL BOAT, 
BY }.O HN AiA RIN 


EZANNE at the end of his search for the realization said, 

“I am the primitive of the way I have discovered.” The 
translation really understates Cezanne’s contribution. We must 
concede him more than a primitive’s achievement. He was the 
first master of a new epoch. All the chapters of this book since 
Cezanne’s have dealt with variations of the impulse he gave, except 
that on mobile color. The art of mobile color, in so far as it 
grew out of a confused notion of the art of painting, stems from 


Impressionism direct. Cezanne turned away from Impressionism 


191 


to a search in the opposite direction. Instead of isolating color 
as an art, he wanted above all else to combine the new-found but 
frittered-away color values with solid compositional values; he 
sought to recapture the “organization” he had seen in certain great 
painters of the past. 

In turning to Expressionism we return to the full current of 
Cezanne’s influence. One cannot say immediately and without 
qualification that Expressionism is the “way” Cezanne “discov- 
ered.” Only history can finally put limits to the word—and here 
we are no longer dealing with history but trying to keep afloat in 
the flood of contemporary practice. This much may be said imme- 
diately, however: No other movement since Cezanne has swept 
across the art world as has Expressionism; and every treatise on 
Expressionism dates the movement from Cezanne. 

Neo-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Synchromism — these 
were schools with particularized technical credos. They were doc- 
trinaire groups tied to a method. Expressionism escapes any such 
limitation of technique or method. It is distinguished only by a 
difference in approach to art. It is broad enough to include the 
emotionally expressive artists out of all these other groups. It is 
only opposed to imitational art. It is broader in another way: it 
already has become a by-word of literary criticism, and the Ex- 
pressionistic playwrights are even recognized as such here in 
America, and Expressionistic architecture is with us but seldom 
recognized. The point is that Expressionism is near to being 
accepted as a summary of the post-Impressionistic art movements, 
and not merely a phase. 


There is still doubt about the first use of the term, and there are 


192 


mie OGhA PH ~ BY «FRANZ MARC 


widely varying definitions of it. The word Expressionism cer- 
tainly gained wide currency in Germany before other countries 
recognized its applicability to their own insurgents. The first artist- 
group to which it was generally applied was that which published 
the Blaue Reiter at Munich. Hermann Bahr, who wrote a book 
called Expressionismus, published in 1920, in his definition 
stressed expression of the artist’s subjective emotion above every- 
thing else. He struck to the heart of the modern conception of 
painting and sculpture by denying the importance of objective as 
against subjective values. He also saw the word “Expressionism” 
as a good foil to the word “Impressionism,” which had gone into 
history as the name of the last phase of realism. No other word 


seems so apt as Expressionism, if one’s purpose is to emphasize the 


193 


shift from impressionistic surface values to emotional values, from 
imitation to expression. Bahr defines the Expressionistic painter 
as one “who must paint, who cannot paint in any other way than he 
does paint, and who is prepared to hang for his way of painting.” 
Subjective indeed! 

The Munich group leaned heavily toward abstraction. Kan- 
dinsky was already a leader, Franz Marc’s Cubistic reflection was 
dropping away into abstract pattern, and minor men perceived a 
new non-representational goal. Expression with this group became 
soul-expression. There was much talk of absolute “experience” 
on the part of the artist, of the painter “painting out of himself,” of 
soul-substance. Fritz Burger, in his Finfuhrung in die Moderne 
Kunst, wrote that the Expressionistic work of art “does not want 
to be any longer the object of an zsthetically educated caste, but 
the embodiment of that incommensurable world which comprises 
our Inner Self. It will not deliver from the World but bring about 
for us the possession of the World’s Inner Greatness, the wonderful 
wealth of variety in form of the Creative Power itself, which is 
the salvation and the ruin of us all.”” Burger seems to have defined 
Expressionism to accord with Kandinsky’s practice. 

A third definition, or group of definitions, at the other extreme, 
has to do with the expression of the inner truth rather than the 
surface aspects of the object seen by the artist. If we are to keep 
an anchor in objectivity, or frankly accept subject-matter as neces- 
sary albeit of secondary importance, there may be in the object 
a deeper reality, a structural truth, an essential character, a uni- 
versal rhythm, which it is the artist’s business to divine and to 
convey. (Remember Marc and the tiger.) That may fairly be 
194 


called Expressionism too, in that it shifts emphasis from the sur- 
face to a deeper expressiveness in the object. 

The only malicious definition of Expressionism that has gained 
any currency is that of Dr. Oskar Pfister, whose book called 
Expressionism in Art has recently appeared in an English trans- 
lation. The author is a psycho-analyst and apparently has no par- 
ticular interest in or background of knowledge of the arts. He 
frankly disclaims any but a biological and psychological intent. 
But he does not hesitate to tell the world what Expressionism is, 
eesthetically as well as scientifically. His definition is this: “The 
Ego, that is, the subjectivity and its varying states, engrosses the 
interest so much that the external object may not dispute its suprem- 
acy and either disappears or becomes unrecognizable. In what 
follows I understand as graphic Expressionism subjective presen- 
tation accompanied by total or almost total distortion of nature to 
the point of unrecognizability, or by suppression of all external 
reality.” Later he speaks of “the psychical discharge into the work 
of art” as the “essential characteristic” of Expressionism; and 
again he says of the Expressionist painter, “all his pictures contain 
the fulfillment of secret desires, which are wholly hidden even 
from himself.” 

The trouble with Dr. Pfister’s evaluation is that he narrows his 
field of observation to the obviously neurotic distress-ridden 
painters, finds their whole source of discordant creation in the 
reservoir of the subconscious, and overlooks form-values entirely. 
He treats what others consider a non-representative movement in 
art as if it were a search for a new sort of representation, with 


the objective source in subconscious memory and desire rather 


195 


than in outward nature. He allows nothing for an absolute esthetic 
value—for that thing which some of us believe is the conditioning 
factor of all truly modern art. He conceives art only as some sort 
of idea-transference. (Readers will find in his book an interesting 
series of analyses, and much material about solipsism and autism 
in art, and their relation to automatic cryptolaly and religious 
glossalaly. But these are hardly subjects for a Primer.) 

I think that any definition of Expressionism, as the word is used 
in Europe and America today, would have to be broad enough to 
include all the developments upon which these earlier definitions 
were based. Personally I find myself using the term as a sum- 
mary of the phases in which the emphasis is on any sort of expres- 
siveness as against imitativeness—and I feel that that is the place 
it will find in history. | 

In short, I consider Expressionism to be that movement in art 
which transfers the emphasis from technical display and imitated 
surface aspects of nature to creative form; from descriptive and 
representative truth to intensified emotional expressiveness; from 
objective to subjective and abstract formal qualities. The greater 
expressiveness of this modern art may and usually does arise from 
three sorts of intensification: of the essential or structural quality 
or “rhythm” of the object as against its outward aspects; of the 
artist’s subjective emotion, of the “image” emotionally conceived 
out of his passion for absolute (though probably unobtainable) 
esthetic form; and of the essential characteristics of his materials. 
The significant form which is most easily identified as the chief 
goal of the Expressionists, and which links them with certain 
periods and artists out of the past, is doubtless achieved ordinarily 


196 


out of the virtues of all three elements, the expressiveness of 
structural truth in nature, the artists’ emotions, and the expressive- 
ness of materials; but it is the second, subjective emotional expres- 
sion, which is at the heart of the matter. 

This definition is purposely broad enough to include those artists 
who attempt abstract creation or are wholly contemptuous of “the 


trivial laws of nature,” 


and those who merely say that it makes 
no difference how close to natural aspects you come or how far you 
distort if emotional intensification is your dominating concern; it 
allows for the new outlook on nature, the artist’s divining and 
recording something there that isn’t obviously on the surface, and 
for absolute self-realization; it further grants that there is a special 
sort of expressiveness in intensification of the particular virtues of 
each material. The Expressionist, in general, is visualized as 
saying to himself: “The artist must forget all the nonsense about 
imitating or representing nature; he must apprehend a sort of 
essential reality in whatever he is dealing with, and express in 
eesthetic form the emotion he has felt. He must cut through so 
much of nature as may stand in the way of intensification and 
liberation of his emotion.” I have overemphasized, perhaps, the 
element of subject, but I wanted to guard against the common 
presumption that in opposing realism and denying surface nature, 
Expressionism gets away from the essentially real. It is the desire 
to go deeper within life that has led the Expressionists to deny the 
validity of surface observation. 

If Expressionism is to be defined so broadly—and we need some 
term to label collectively the emotional-formal tendencies of post- 


Impressionistic art—it will be serviceable to glance back and see 


197 


STILL LIFE, BY HENRI MASI So 


which developments of the last thirty years come within the defini- 
tion. The only really important exclusion is Gauguin and his fol- 
lowers in the decorative school. Sensuous expressiveness does, 
perhaps, link them closer to the Expressionists than to the realists 
—hbut decoration is what they are after and a decorative name 
should be theirs. It may be recorded that a great many modern 
painters feel that the essential art of painting goes deeper than 
that: to achieve purely decorative results is to miss the extra 
dimension that counts most. Two other exclusions must be noted: 


the Futurists, because they were at heart illustrators, merely prac- 


198 


ticing a new sort of representation; and the Gleizes-Metzinger wing 
of the Cubists, who went back to an insistence upon two-dimen- 
sional art. 

The banner of the Expressionists might easily spread over Ce- 
zanne, van Gogh (rather by virtue of his utter devotion to paint 
as such than for subjective expression), the Cubists who searched 
as Picasso and Braque did for a deeper structural expressiveness, 
the Vorticists seeking “the hot impressions of life mated with 


Abstraction,’ 


9 


and the entire Matisse-Picasso development with its 
emotional art stripped of trivialities and inessentials—together 
with the vigorous German, Russian and American off-shoots of 
this French school, and even a pale Cezannish reflection in England. 

But it was Germany where the name was adopted and where the 
Expressionistic current runs strongest today, and it is there that 
we may well take up the story-thread of this chapter. Munich had 
been the home of secession and counter-secession during the early 
years of the new century. When Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky 
and others formed what was later to be called the first Expression- 
istic group—the Blauen Reiters—it might have been possible to 
trace back their origins to two sources: Paris and the French 
“fauves,’ and the “young Germany” movement which had already 
stirred German art and letters without any very definite esthetic- 
radical aims. The Norwegian Edward Munch had come nearer 
than anyone else to crystallizing revolutionary thought in German 
painting—and there are doubtless roots out to Nietzsche, Russian 
Realism, Strindberg, etc. But the Munich development is the first 
important instance of a typical Expressionistic group coming into 


world prominence with that name tagged to them. 


Of Kandinsky I have said enough. His most important fellow- 
painter was Franz Marc, a versatile and vigorous artist too little 
recognized outside Germany. He had something of Cezanne’s 
color-form quality in his work throughout his mature years, and 
it is easy to trace the influence also of Cubism, Futurism and Kan- 
dinsky’s sort of abstraction. His paintings, drawings and wood- 
cuts dealt very largely with animals, but toward the end these were 
all but lost in the abstract “organization” of his canvases. The 
Thierschicksale (page 173) is one of the most famous examples. 
Since Marc has been labeled as an “animal painter,” it will be 
illuminating for the reader to call to mind those artists of another 
era, Rosa Bonheur and Landseer. A comparison should indicate 
again how far subject-matter has latterly been sacrificed to some 
inner necessity of the picture’s formal composition. At times, 
however, Marc fell prey to a Futuristic sort of illustrative art. 
The illustration a few pages back is one’of a remarkable series of 
near-abstract drawings with incidental animal motives. 

Among the others in the Blauen Reiters growp were the Russian 
Jawlensky, whose raw and vigorous portraits more than suggested 
primitive sources, and the American Albert Bloch, whose figure 
paintings seem in black-and-white reproduction to have a dream- 
like vagueness, although in the color they are usually brilliant and 
even, to unaccustomed eyes, insistent. Bloch has been through 
several “periods,” ‘but always he has been free from academic 
slavery to accidentals, and no American has been more thoroughly 
individual and independent. Few artists in this country—he has 
been back on this side for several years—have “distorted” so 


freely—or with so much sheer esthetic compensation. 


200 


A man of prime importance who was closely associated with 
the Munich group, if not of it, is Paul Klee. His work usually 
looks like primitiveness of the “child-art’ sort—paintings and 
drawings which might seem at first juvenile scratchings, but which 


never fail to have esthetic validity. He is counted one of the chief 


PROPHET, —bpY EMIL NOLDE 


figures in German Expressionism today, even though he seldom 
does anything more “important” looking than the three water- 
colors scattered through this book. Klee and Kandinsky are both 
associated at present with the group that has developed in Weimar 
what is at present the most interesting school and experimental 
laboratory of the arts existent anywhere. 

Oskar Kokoschka is the most significant figure in mid-European 


art today, ranking in importance with Picasso and Matisse. His 


201 


work is so typical of modernism that I find that I have used: three 
reproductions of his paintings as chapter headings and at other 
key points (pages 3, 29 and 88). He, more clearly than any 
other, has built solidly on what Cezanne “discovered.” But he 
has also gone beyond Cezanne if anyone has: he has accomplished 
authoritatively the broad, sweeping, structural, organizational 
thing which is the special object of search of the typically German 
Expressionists. He is not German by birth or early training; but 
his work and his maturer life have been in the full current of 
German radicalism. He is recognized there as perhaps the most 
essentially modern master, and he exerts—through his works—a 
wide influence. There are few things in this book which will so 
well repay study as his: for intensity, for directness, for rugged 
form. 

When the current of the Munich development flowed into those 
others out of Berlin’s “New Secession” group and the Dresden 
“Briicke” group which had iong before broken new ground, there 
came into existence the full stream of German Expressionism. 
And where the South-German development had been spotty and 
individualistic and sometimes markedly derivative, this larger 
movement had a distinctive cachet. The paintings of Kokoschka, 
Jawlensky, Cesar Klein, Karl Hofer, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, 
Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Mueller, Ernst Ludwig 
Kirchner, Max Kaus, Heinrich Nauen, W. R. Huth, have an inten- 
sity, a look of “wading through nature,” a ruthlessness in the search 
for form, which is wholly unparalleled elsewhere except in scat- 
tered individuals. If the academicians have been successively 


horrified by Cezanne, Matisse, the Cubists and the Futurists, they 


202 


EeNDSCAPE, BY ERICH HECK EL 


still will find room for new shocks when they visit the up-to-date 
German galleries. And the German official galleries, unlike those 
of the rest of the world, do buy freely of radical contemporary 
works. Perhaps the semi-Socialistic government has something 
to do with it; more likely it is an indication of the thoroughness 
of the Expressionistic conflagration in Central Europe. It was the 
Director of one of Germany’s greatest galleries who said to me last 
year that there was no longer any such thing as a conservative 


young painter in Germany: the country as a whole is committed 


203 


to Expressionism. It is difficult for an American, Englishman or 
Frenchman to realize how far the “Junge Kunst’? movement has 
gone; and it is an experience to go into the museums that corre- 
spond to the Metropolitan Museum, the Luxembourg and the Lon- 
don National Gallery, and there find not only Cezanne, van Gogh, 
Gauguin, Matisse, Kandinsky, Marc and Kokoschka, but the really 
wild things of Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff and Nolde. The National 
Gallery at Berlin, the great Dresden Gallery and the New State 
Gallery at Munich, all have their generous rooms of modernist 
work. 

Matisse probably created the greatest of all French sensations 
for daring directness in painting. He seemed to have stripped art 
of every shred of crnament, triviality or extraneous meaning. But 
his work seems tame in true “Junge Kunst” company. Incidentally 
one may add that no other of the Fauwves has had such influence 
upon the young German painters. But they set out for a fuller 
sort of intensification. As progress in modern music seems to 
conservative ears merely the discovery of more and more jarring 
discords, so the conservative eye is likely to see in these paintings 
only a step further in daring color combinations. But the saving 
point is that the painters know what they are after and why they 
are throwing away imitativeness and polish. With true German 
thoroughness the savants have written book after book on “The 
Form Problem in Art.” And painter after painter throws himself 
headlong into the search. The “treat ’em rough” aspect of so much 
contemporary German art, so disturbing to the newcomer’s eyes, 
is simply an indication that young Germany has caught a glimmer 


of some absolute quality named form, and has gone after it. We 


204 


WO MOASN © Wil THe CUAL 
Boo MARS  PrOoOH' SE TN 


may be sure that not a great many will find it—or record it so that 
it speaks even to receptive minds; but with a Kokoschka the result 
is always authoritative, and Heckel, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, 
Nauen and Pechstein have seemed to some of us to mark a new 
gain in organizational strength, to hive pushed farther along the 
road travelled by les Fauves. 

In any case, let no one fool himself into thinking that the whole 
effort is merely wild or that it marks retrogression. So much of 
feverish energy expended is bound to result in achievement. And if 
the men mentioned seem wild—if Cesar Klein is a Cezanne-follower 
who has thrown discretion and refinement to the winds, and if Pech- 
stein sometimes seems a crude Matisse, and Schmidt-Rottluff seems 
committed to the crudities of negro art, at least Hans Purrmann 


carries on the Matisse tradition with more grace than anyone I can 


205 


think of out of the rest of Europe, Josef Eberz tempers German 
ruthlessness with a certain technical restraint, and Lionel Feininger 
(originally American) is more interesting than any other Cubist 
except Picasso and Braque. 

The quality most characteristic of German Expressionism is, 
perhaps, intensity. The groundwork of the revolution here was, 
as in France, a shift from surface aspects to constructive and emo- 
tional qualities; to a feeling for structure, stronger and moving 
color, and, of course, independence of nature. But the reaction 
to “cultured” painting, to refinement and technical display, to 
“society” art, was even more complete. Everything was sacrificed 
to recording the emotion while it was hot. Colors piled up without 
regard to nature or timid ideas of harmony, unessentials were for- 
gotten, distortion came to be second‘ nature, the painter rode rough- 
shod out for structural feeling, compactness, intensity of emotion. 
And structural strength, profound organizational movement, is 
Germany’s contribution to the continuing search. Erich Heckel 
has the quality characteristically, and I am showing one of. his 
typical landscapes here. 

Even so I find that I have left out mention of the real extremists. 
Most notably they are Marc Chagall and Heinrich Campendonk. 
One cannot deny the validity of their canvases and woodcuts when 
considered without regard to subject. But there rises here the 
question where distortion for esthetic purpose ends and mere per- 
verseness begins. In Chagall’s work particularly, the objective 
abnormality obtrudes constantly: it is not merely that planes are 
rearranged, color arbitrary, or essentials built up at the expense 


of inessentials; heads are placed at the far corner from the bodies 


206 


they once presumably rode upon, figures walk upside down or 
float across the sky, women have cow-heads, etc., etc. There is, 
too, an excess of bottles, vomitings, and general physical sug- 
gestiveness. In Georg Grosz this is often carried over into not 
only sexual suggestiveness but illustration of sex vice of every 
sort, picturing a world of prostitutes, avaricious and bestial men, 
and general tenderloin surroundings. This sort of thing may serve 
as a castigating force for the social organization that warps life, 
but it has lost all claim to being art—simply because the emphasis 
is on the objective and meaningful. It is a good time to repeat, 
perhaps, that for every truly important modernist artist there are 
a host of charlatans, shockers and incompetents. The whole move- 
ment, too, is mixed up with the backwash of war violence, unre- 
straint and, at points, insanity. We touch here again on Dada and 
Dr. Pfister’s neurotic-subconscious, psychic-discharge Expression- 
ism. But if there seems to be an overplus of shock for shock’s 
sake, of horrors, profanity, sex perversion and supernaturalism in 
this current, we may look back to many a sane and clean Expres- 
sionist and know that the stream will come clear at last. 

When I turn from German Expressionism to French, I know that 
I am getting back to something comparatively safe and sane, into 
an atmosphere less feverish and more charged with background and 
certainty. But I must add that I miss a little the quality of vigor 
and a certain intensity which are among the finest characteristics 
of contemporary German endeavor. 

“Expressionism” must, indeed, be a broad term to cover the 
bulk of the radicals in Paris. For just now individualism (within 


limits) is the order of the day. Some critics feel that the lack of 


207 


GIRL CARRYING WATER; 
BY JOSEPH BERNARD 


significant movements or new figures since the war argues a case 
of arrested development, -others feel that this is the lull before a 
new storm, and at least one argues that painting is “done.” But 
an art does not die so quickly, and Paris will not so easily give 
way as center of art-progress. In actual esthetic achievement, the 
output of that one city can hardly be challenged for supremacy. 
It is true that Matisse these many years has made little new 
progress. Some of us even prefer—in most moods—the daring 
and starkly simple things of fifteen and twenty years ago to the 
softer, fuller Matisse product of today. But he is doing finely 
expressive work and must be counted in any roll-call of modern 
masters. Picasso, picturesque leaper from peak to peak of the 
modernistic range, has started school after school of radical experi- 
ment and search, the most notable being Cubism; but latterly he 
has been off on a vague hunt for some meeting-place of the classi- 
cists and the form-seekers. He wields an extraordinary world 
influence; but he seems to be fumbling a little about the shooting 
of his next bolt. His recent severe, rounded figure-studies have 
the appearance of seeking primarily sculptural values in painting; 
and his latest Cubistic experiments, fine as they are, add nothing 
to what he was accomplishing in that direction several years ago. 
But it is just as likely that he will stage a spectacular leap in the 
least expected direction at the least expected moment. In solid 
achievement, through all his periods, he remains probably the most 
significant painter living. (I have just seen John Quinn’s remark- 
able collection of his work, a pageant of living beauty without 
parallel in any other group of modern canvases I can recall.) 


Cubism drags on as a doctrinaire affair in Paris, but the wise 


209 


ones seem to be those who got out with an equipment of a new 
vision and an enriched technique. . Of the original Fawves—the 
“wild ones” of the early years of the century—the most important, 
aside from Picasso and Matisse, have turned out to be André 
Derain, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Othon Friesz. 
Friesz has come closer than any other Frenchman to achieving that 
sort of intensity and structural strength that is so marked across 
the Rhine. He piles up his materials, he has vigor, he builds joy- 
ously and carelessly. And, as in the Germans, there is beyond the 
apparent carelessness of surface a sound structure and amazing 
compactness. Here is a man who adds to what he learned out of 
Cezanne and Matisse. 

Not quite so much can.be said of Vlaminck’s suave canvases. 
Strength is just what he lacks. _He makes Cezannism appealing— 
but seldom gets any farther. 

André Derain by contrast has kept full within the current of 
post-Cezanne modernism. He has been Cezannesque, Fauvish, 
Cubistic, and classical-Expressionistic. If he has never startled, 
being a follower, he at least has kept to the front with Matisse and 
Picasso. And he emerges today as one of the most influential men 
in French art. He assuredly ranks next to Picasso in world impor- 
tance. Perhaps the way in which he has incorporated each new 
discovery of his group into the essential French “good painting” 
has something to do with his popularity. 

There is a suspicion about that the essentially French radicalism 
is content to sit only part way on the left; certainly the Spaniard 
Picasso, the Italian Futurists, the American Synchromists, the 


Russian Ballet and German Expressionism, have borne in a great 


210 


POM NS HARVEST; BY OPHON FRIESZ 


deal of the extremer radicalism. One wonders whether, let alone, 
France might not prefer Marquet and Bonnard and Marie Lauren- 
cin—moderate modernists all. The French spirit perhaps could be 
best traced through Renoir, Bonnard, Vuillard, Marquet, Lauren- 
cin. There is a softer, prettier, more sensuous emotion about 
these—not the stark, uncompromising sensibility that animates 
alike the Cubists, the Vorticists, the German and Russian Expres- 
sionists. 

But these painters are, someone opines, the weak sisters of the 


revolution. Hardly that—but not ruthlessly radical either. Their 


211 


ITALIAN WOMAN, BY ANDRE DERAIN 


daring is tempered with an inherited grace. Which raises the 
subtle question how far a noble tradition may become a handicap 
in times of change. How far will France, having the only living 
national tradition in painting which is worth having, stand by, 


renounce or modify that tradition in conflict with the forces of 


212 


modernism? Or will there be enough Derains to follow, consoli- 
date the progress, make it sane? 

Marie Laurencin retains much that is typically, wholesomely, 
gracefully French. She has given way to modernist pressure to 
the extent of abandoning truth of aspect. But here is no urgent 
carrying on of Cezanne’s search or of later experiment. An occa- 
sional portrait may go back to a simplicity that is Matisse’s, a bit 
of a still life may catch something of abstract form—but in general 
the emotional expressiveness is not very deep. Marie Laurencin’s 
virtues are rather in an adorable femininity. She gives us of her- 
self—her lovely French self. The innumerable graceful girls of 
her pictures, the decorative arrangements, the cooling colors, these 
are—like Gauguin’s paintings—of an order for which we are grate- 
ful (and when have we not been grateful for French painting?), 
but they have lured us from the highroad of the moderns. In sculp- 
ture there is the similar graceful radicalism of Joseph Barnard— 
attractive but hardly profound. 

Dufy, Lhote, Renault, Segonzac, Marchand, de la Fresnaye, 
these are painters nearer in the full current—and yet not one a 
master in the sense that Matisse was one and Kokoschka is one. 
Beyond them I find in my jottings and notes about France a bewil- 
dering array of competent, able and progressive men, who would 
bulk as local leaders anywhere except in Paris. Some of them are 
immature, some are following Cezanne or Picasso but without 
genius, some doubtless are experimenting in fields that will be fruit- 
ful later. There is the saving point: you cannot bring together so 
many competent, thoroughly trained, sensitive artists and not reap 


a harvest of creative work every so often. 


213 


CIRCUS, BY MARIE LAURER CUS 


The more I consider the matter, the more I think there is a per- 
ceptible lull in French art. But out of the hosts who gather in 
Paris, if a new Matisse does not come, a new foreign-born Picasso 
will arise. In addition to her own, France harbors hundreds of the 
most talented from elsewhere. Painters as important as the. Polish 
Kisling and the Japanese Foujita and the Russian Larionoff are 


there. Someone has suggested that the next cycle may start when 


214 


the brilliant Paris hosts begin to understand what it is that German 
Expressionism has captured in its ten years of isolation—by way 
of compact structural movement and intensity of emotion. Or per- 
haps America, knowing something of intensity, will make its 


contribution. 


BY BORIS GRIGORIEFF 


a 
% 


XII 


THE GEOGRAPHY AND 
ANATOMY OF MODERN ART 


q 


a 


fewer hORGE, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE 


ATIONALISM is going out; but there will always be a 
geography of art. And a smattering of the geography of 
modern art is, I suppose, more or less necessary to a comprehension 
of the subject as a whole. There used to be great national schools, 
where racial characteristics were powerful in shaping the forms of 
expressiveness. But as nationalism becomes diluted, art tends to 
become cosmopolitan. The one great center of the graphic arts 
in recent generations, France, has become a center geographically 
rather than racially. 
There is, of course, a French tradition, a French spirit in paint- 
ing and sculpture. But stronger than that has been the tradition 
that Paris is the hub of the art world, that America and England 


and Scandinavia and Russia and Germany and the Mediterranean 


219 


countries must send their students there to learn “good painting.” 
Perhaps that same “good painting” which was the French tradition 
has become the world tradition—is France’s gift to the world- 
artist. But the racial element inevitably is pretty well watered out 
by now. Like the old New-England Americanism, it has been 
mixed, fused, almost lost as an entity. Paris is still geographically 
the center, but a Paris wherein Russians, Spaniards, even Americans 
sit in the high councils of (unofficial) art. 

How far the greatly increased facilitation of travel, and the 
rapid exchange of ideas through almost instantaneous news service 
and the phenomenal growth of magazine and book production, will 
tend to break down national barriers permanently cannot be 
prophesied. No one can be sure whether we shall have again the 
sort of overconcentration of art activities illustrated in the Paris 
of the 19th Century. Munich was beginning to attract considerable 
numbers of Russian and American students even before the war; 
and the time is fast passing when any American, if he really has 
the stuff in him, needs to go for training farther than New York. 
He might even better turn his face Westward. But what I am get- 
ting at is that the spread of what we today call modernistic art has 
been wider and swifter than any similar development in art history. 
Provincialism and insularity are less excusable than ever before, 
old frontiers are disappearing, we are all becoming world- 
minded. ; 

Geographically, America is for the first time on the creative art 
map. If we were there a quarter-century ago it was largely as a 
French province, 100-per-cent loyal. Today we take freely from 


Paris, but also from Russia and Germany. Drawing new strength 


220 


from our own rediscovered West, we are beginning to give to the 
world as well as take. What complexion any discernible racial 
strain in our art shows or will show, is a question absolutely defying 
analysis. We are typical of the new de-concentration. 

To learn geography properly, one must tour. In these pages we 
have already covered France and Germany pretty thoroughly, 
although the name-posts were not always out. We need only sum- 
marize developments there—then off to the rest of Europe and 
America to examine currents of achievement and influence more 
particularly. Italy we may mark off as having contributed little 
more than the furore over the clever Futurists. Through Russia, 
Holland, England, America, our route lies—after Paris, Munich, 
Dresden, Berlin. 

Paris was the home of the first revolution. No one would expect 
it to develop anywhere else, because the major portion of the 
world’s proficient painters were probably working there at the time. 
It takes a flourishing settled-down art to beget a vigorous revolu- 
tion. At any rate Cezanne was French. Paris might also be 
marked as a sort of false birth-place of modernist architecture. 
The “art nouveau” was born—but fortunately died young. But 
real modern architecture is more German than French, perhaps 
more Dutch than German, more American than either. Musical 
progress, too, has been spotty; the modern theatre belongs largely 
to central and northern Europe; and who shall say what was the 
origin of modern verse? It is in the visual arts that Paris domi- 
nates the rebellion. After Cezanne, the Cubists are largely a local 
group. The fawves, geographically centered at Paris, are a mixed 


company, and the gospel begins to spread. After Matisse a few 


221 


individuals are world figures, but the “movement” no longer 
revolves entirely about Paris. In the chapter on Expressionism 
I noted the individualistic aims of the several leaders in France 
today—the post-Fauve period. There is undeniably a lull in 
creative activity, a lack of unity of effort, a slowing up—age rather 
than youth at the front. France is perhaps paying the price of her 
early world-leadership. Gaining leadership, and with it satisfaction 
and self-sufficiency, Paris has been suffering from an in-growing 
tendency—and consequent isolation. The world’s capital has itself 
become provincial. New blood is needed. There is even a whisper 
that French modernist artists should go to school a little to German 
art. One can imagine the horror and contempt with which such a 
suggestion would be met in a Parisian atelier. But contempt, par- 
ticularly when colored with an old political animosity, hardly puts 
forward the uses of open-mindedness—and open-mindedness is 
part and parcel of true modernism. 

It is only open-minded to grant that what goes to make up German 
Expressionism is at the moment the most vigorous art development 
anywhere in the world, having its roots in music, in the theatre, in 
literature, as well as in painting and sculpture. I confess that it is 
difficult for me to reconcile with the recent creative progress in these 
arts, certain things in German life and customs: a general coarse- 
ness of character among the bourgeoisie, the way the German 
women wear their clothes, the stolid seriousness of earlier national 
art. It is true, too, that they seldom breed an individual leader and 
prophet of their own; but they recognize and absorb world geniuses 
more readily than any other nation. If it was not Cezanne or 


Matisse who did the groundwork for “Expressionismus” in paint- 


222 


Pi Wike LORMS, BY CHARLES SHEELER 


ing, it was the Norwegian Edward Munch or the Swiss Hodler. 
If it is sad to see Gordon Craig, chief revolutionary figure in the 
modern theatre, an exile from his native England and almost wholly 
without influence there, it is not difficult to see that his ideas have 
revolutionized the German theatres. The American Frank Lloyd 
Wright is quite without noticeable honor at home, but the Germans 
have books about him, acknowledge him as a modern master, and 
build after his fashion. The new generation in Germany is reaping 


the benefit of this receptiveness in the old. They are making the 


2123 


PORTRAIT, BY BORIS GRIGOR 2a 


derived traditions their own in a new synthesis, a living achieve- 
ment. Perhaps German thoroughness—at other times called ruth- 
lessness—is pushing it through to achievement. At any rate, there 
it is: painting which collectively has more of living quality, of 
unity of purpose, possibly more of a beyond-Cezanne organizational 
strength within the picture, than any other can show; the beginnings 
of an architecture that is of today, honest in construction, true to 
materials, expressive; and a theatre which is the most interestingly 


alive and forward-moving (and I suppose the most enjoyable 


224 


theatrically for those who understand the language) of all in the 
contemporary world. 

Russian art under the Soviets is reported to be the most modern- 
istic in Christendom—sometimes enthusiastically reported, more 
often horrifiedly. We may well believe that the country is almost 
as thoroughly committed to Expressionism as is Germany. It would 
only be natural, considering Russia’s art history and origins. 
Russia has, indeed, greatly influenced Germany toward radicalism. 
And today important Russian artists are scattered over Europe 
and America, to the enrichment of internationalism and _ local 
galleries. Among the leaders in Germany are the Russians Kandin- 
sky, Jawlensky and Chagall. Archipenko is also there, I believe, 
although he was for long considered a leader among the radical 
sculptors in Paris. France has long claimed Larionoff, Goncharova 
and Soudekin, of theatre fame as well as painters, and the impor- 
tant Grigorieff, of whose virile but polished Expressionism I am 
reproducing an example opposite. And here in America we 
have all the shades of Russian radicalism, from the slightly-so 
Anisfeld and Roerich to the intensely-so Burliuk. It is only fair to 
suppose that the younger generation within the Russian borders has 
developed equally important men who as yet are little-known out- 
side the Soviet dominion. 

Holland, original home of Vincent van Gogh, has since developed 
no individual figure of his stature. But no other country is more 
pervadingly modern in the thought and practice of its artists. This 
is especially true in architecture, where the pioneer Berlage trained 
up a new generation of original builder-artists who escape entirely 


the imitative “styles” to which ninety-nine per cent of the Western 


225 


PORTRAIT, BY- KEES VAN] DGONGEw 


world’s architects are slaves. The painters Kees van Dongen and 
Jan Sluyters are best known beyond the Dutch borders: van Dongen 
for a talent that is anything but realistic, with a catchy and light 
sort of modernness that has made him a vogue in Paris; Sluyters 
with a less personal but more firmly emotional and structural 
quality. One cannot fairly leave the Dutchmen without mentioning 
Jan Toorop, who pioneered in an imaginative but less essentially 


Expressionistic direction, and Jacoba van Heemskerck, whose 


226 


strange near-abstractions parallel pictorially some of the two- 
dimensional layout-panels of the later Cubists. 

Speaking of catchy things and two-dimensional things, one harks 
back inevitably to the Viennese-Munich decorative school of art— 
that development which came between “l’art nouveau’ and true 
modernism, escaping the vulgarity of the one and missing the spirit 
of the other. Vienna has her painters in the best tradition of 
expressiveness—notably a group of Kokoschka-influenced men, 
and Egon Schiele and Wiegele and Kolig. But to many of us the 
typical art of Vienna is the objective art of utter grace and exquisite 
sophistication. Style is deified, connoisseurship honored, an ultra- 
refined feminine sort of decorative beauty becomes the only objec- 
tive. “Stylization” tells the story: style for its own sake. We love 
these things the Viennese make for the gratification of our senses: 
the luscious decorative paintings of Klimt, the insinuating decora- 
tive architecture of Hoffmann and Witzmann, the smart decorative 
jewelry and vases and small sculptures and lettering of Dagobert 
Peche and Richard Teschner. And when we see the furniture and 
handicraft, with its generally simple, elegantly simple lines, but 
with a bit of seductive ornament placed with absolute rightness, we 
wish that all our stodgy craftsmen could go to school to the Austrian 
Werkbund for a while, that Joseph Urban would spread his New 
York branch of the Vienna Werkstaette until all America can feel 
the decorative influence—as all of Germany so richly has. In its 
ornamental way, this Viennese movement has been one of the most 
complete and most wholesome triumphs in the short annals of mod- 
erm art. This group found astyle. The catch is that in the absolute 


arts—not craft-arts—style and ornament are the last things that the 


227 


modernists want. Vienna can decorate a given surface—canvas, 
gold, textile or built wall—more charmingly than any other city in 
the world. But modern art, of the serious sort, must go below the 


surface or die. 


SILVER MATCH BO 
BY .DA.GOBE Re PECs 


England. The England where once Turner pointed a new way 
for world art. But now an England strangely cold to change. 
Somehow the word Expressionism simply will not come in connec- 
tion with any British activity. The form-arts have never prospered 
here. The English have had no genius in music, and little creative 
music for centuries; they have hardly had a first-rate talent in 
sculpture up to the present decade. Their architecture, except for 
the homelike cottage, is in general coldly correct and imitative. 
They have scored beyond all others recently in intellectual drama, 


but their theatre is least touched of any in Europe by the wave of 


228 


Expressionism. And aside from the theorizing of the Vorticists 
and the paintings of Wyndham Lewis, the modernism of English 
painters is an echo of nearby Parisian developments. The Ameri- 
can progressive always marvels, I think, at the vagueness of that 
echo when he considers the fewness of the hours that measure the 
distance between London and Paris. 

Emotional intensification is at the very heart of Expressionism, 
and emotional sensibility is not an English trait. (England has 
remained national, I think, more than any other important Western 
country.) English painting has ever tended toward illustration and 
away from problems of form. It is little wonder then, that aside 
from Lewis, one hears no large modernistic noise out of Britain; 
echoes from the French salons constitute the bulk of the undertone. 
Roger Fry practises an attractive sort of intellectual Cezannism, 
Harold Gilman was a sort of English van Gogh, with honest vision 
and solid color, and C. W. R. Nevinson has absorbed successively 
Futuristic, Cubistic and other techniques but never got far below 
any surface—although one “likes” his canvases. Clive Bell opines 
that Duncan Grant is the one English world-figure in painting since 
Constable, and the only one worthy to stand with the world’s fore- 
most modernists. His honestly British form-seeking landscapes 
and still-lifes hardly deserve to rank so high—but I hasten to repair 
the average by saying that men like Paul Nash and Mark Gertler 
and Edward Wadsworth give us hope that, after all, structure and 
form are finding their way into British painting. For these are 
painters who are doing work only a little short of great accomplish- 
ment. One must add the names of Vanessa Bell and J. D. Ferguson 


as significant also. But the greatest artist living in England today 


229 


is, I hazard, the American-Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein—of 
whom, and the native Eric Gill, I shall have much to say in a later 
chapter. Of course the greatest living Englishman in the field of 
the arts, by circumstance more prophet than practitioner, is Gordon 
Craig of Italy—whom we shall meet again in still another chapter. 
America, English-derived, English puritanical, English provincial 
in so many matters, offers a curious contrast to England in most of 
the fields of art. Not that America has been wildly radical in face 
of English coldness, or generally art-loving. Far from it! We 
have had a long, hard struggle against Puritan and Anglo-Saxon 
tradition, and our artists have always been half-starved. But in 
such radicalism as we have with us, the quality is anything but 
British. Nor is it any longer quite 100-per-cent French. There is 
even a discernible native note in it. Our most indisputable advance 
has been in architecture, an art still academic and dead in both 
England and France. We have long had sculpture near to our 
hearts, and if we have there somewhat echoed Paris, the sound still 
has reverberated with a native fullness. We have never had a play- 
wright to compare with the English intellectual product, but our 
young theatre, unlike the British, is fairly alive with Expressionistic 
desires and experiment. About these three arts of sculpture, archi- 
tecture and the theatre I shall have more to say in coming chapters. 
It is the quality of American painting that I would explore here. 
The background is in general the weak Impressionism and the 
tired academicism of 57th Street, together with a very live virile 
native Impressionism, boasting a group of show painters with a 
virtuosity unequalled except in France along the entire belated- 


Impressionist cycle. The quality of the modernism which for 


230 


Cre Uo ae oii) Wea LU ON 


fifteen years or so has struggled toward recognition before this 
background, has been based, I think, on an early realization, on the 
part of perhaps a dozen painters, that the realistic-descriptive era 
in painting was over and that the form-quality in Cezanne and 
Matisse held the key to the future. I am putting the statement thus, 
because I think it was recognition of an accomplished break, and 
not individual vision, that pointed the way for most of the new men 
on this side of the Atlantic. The ground must have been fertile, 


however, and creative sensibility richly there, or we should not have 


231 


had such fine individual achievements as Marin’s, O’Keeffe’s, 
Kuhn’s, Hartley’s. 

If the group as a whole has failed to register in a great way, it 
has been because the search for formal qualities was too implicitly 
accepted as part of the new faith, too doctrinairely adhered to, not 
come at out of individual emotion. The anchor in objectivity was 
too often chosen to serve a set purpose, thus leaving out the life 
quality, failing to enrich the finished product with emotional over- 
tones. But it was something that so long ago so many American 
painters drew away from display-illustration. Expressionism in 
America has a history back to the first decade of the century. 

The date might almost be fixed by reference to the calendar of 
exhibitions at the Photo-Secession Gallery—the famous “29]”’—in 
New York. And the artist who is likely to be named oftenest 
in connection with the first quarter-century of American post- 
Impressionism, when the history of the movement is written, is 
Alfred Stieglitz. He knows better, instinctively, what expression 
is than any other American. In his photography he has given us a 
record that is a miracle of the machine as slave to artistic sensi- 
bility. He also has that gift for infecting other men with enthusiasm 
and creative impulse which made “291” an oasis in New York for 
many years. In the pre-war years most of what was most worth 
while in American painting centered there. Cezanne, Matisse, 
Picasso, Braque, were introduced to America, as were lesser figures 
like Picabia, Henri Rousseau, de Zayas, Brancusi and Nadelman— 
and “special” things like Rodin’s drawings, Geiger’s etchings, 
negro sculpture and children’s drawings. 


The first collective exhibition of American moderns was held at 


232 


INOW OTK Key 
Beye ASB REAM. PW ALEK OW. DTZ 


“291” in 1910, and it is notable that already so important a group 
as Dove, Hartley, Weber and Marin was included. The first Marin 
show had been in 1909, and Alfred Maurer and Marsden Hartley 
were shown in the same year. Marin and Hartley one-man exhibi- 
tions followed at intervals until the closing of the gallery in 1917; 
Max Weber had his own show in 1911, Dove in 1912, Walkowitz 
in 1912 and 1916 and Bluemner in 1915. And finally Georgia 
O'Keeffe exhibited in 1916. Stieglitz as a personality affected the 
art development of all these leaders. 


233 


SKETCH ‘FO Reo PA DNA ia 
BY -ARTHU:R 5G. DO ONen 


The first big general exhibition was the famous international 
“Armory Show” in 1913, which fortunately was not New York’s 
alone. It will go down in history as the most important landmark 
of the “movement.” Since then several galleries owned by dealers 


have “turned modern,” the Societé Anonyme has been organized to 


234 ‘ 


keep alive the spirit of daring and to offer wall space to the newest 
rebels. Independent Shows offer a haven to anything and every- 
thing, the art magazines (so-called) have opened their pages gener- 
ously to the heretics—and modernism is in danger of becoming 
popular. 

John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe are perhaps the Americans 
who have escaped most freely and most joyously from the confines 
of the older painting. They seem to revel in a free playing with 
form, without the slightest trace of self-consciousness. No man 
anywhere is more master of the watercolor medium than is Marin. 
He is beyond it and free for expression. He not only is no slave 
to transcription of nature, but hardly holds to objectivity in the 
slightest degree. And yet there is never the feel of his reaching 
for abstraction as a separate thing: there is always enough of con- 
tact with the perceived world to quiet the mind. Beyond that the 
magic of emotion is almost invariably there—the realization, 
the rhythmic order. The only valid criticism of his work comes not 
from the academicians but from the modernists who feel that his 
achievement is too much in one key. But in its limited range it is 
magnificent. 

Where Marin seems to capture emotional intensity rapidly, bril- 
liantly, with feverish abandon, getting down the palpitating image 
broadly in emotional outline—Georgia O’Keeffe seems to intensify 
calmly, to work through clear-headedly in silence, but with heart no 
less stirred and kept aflame in her steady way. She wanders the 
whole field from apples to abstraction. She is bold, but always 
within a harmonious restraint; her canvases are compact, the design 


counting strongly, color emotional, the absolute feeling poised with 


235 


PORTRAIT; BY WADT) Bile 


exquisite certainty. Order here is conceived femininely, musically. 
In the still-lifes the corners, the patches, the objects answer each 
other compositionally. The abstract ‘“arrangements”—subtly 
geometrical and hard as compared with Kandinsky’s soft spirit- 
wanderings—are like planes out of space, made living with color, 
meeting with paper-edge sharpness or rounding into perfect breast- 
like contours. Incidentally her canvases more than those of any 
other artist might afford Thomas Wilfred the perfect theme for one 
of his mobile color improvisations. Contrast, organization, play of 


textures, woman’s emotion—made expressive in paint. 


236 


A true cosmopolitan, a constant seeker, more a dreamer, wanderer 
back and forth—America to Europe, Europe to America, East to 
West, West to East—Marsden Hartley is less stable than these 
others, but shows a wider diversity in exhibition. His native New 
England, a still-life and decoration period, a Far West period 
(wherein he made Cezanne’s direct influence his own more surely 
than any other American), a formalized arranged-object period— 
all these are easily marked in retrospect. Never merely a tran- 
scriptionist, he has grown steadily in power, in devotion to a hidden 
‘order; more than a competent painter in each of the branches he 
has essayed, he has justly built up an international reputation. 

Walt Kuhn, I imagine, could more easily than any other Ameri- 
can send to Paris a group of canvases of such strength, richness and 
diversity that they would stand up brilliantly in any exhibition 
there. He has most definitely made himself master of the French 
“fine painting” as that tradition has been absorbed into modernism 
by men like Matisse and Derain. I have seen canvases of his that 
might go without apology into that company, finely organizational 
things, moving, masterly. He is more a product of his training, 
less individualistic, by token of that same mastery—but creative- 
ness and sensibility are richly there. 

There are those who count that of the Americans Charles Demuth 
most completely and definitely captures “form.” He almost has a 
method for it, a soft ground of rounded forms and a brittle geomet- 
rical organization against it. When he gets it right, it speaks clear 
and true emotionally. But too often his utter simplification, his 
elimination of everything extraneous, leaves the canvas a little 


empty, the color a little vague. 


237 


eee a 
BY CHARLES DEMUTH 

Of the “291” group there survive significantly, beside Marin, 
O’Keeffe and Hartley, three others: Max Weber, Arthur G. Dove 
and Abram Walkowitz. Dove is most known by virtue of concen- 
tration on one thing—or is it a sign of deeper emotion? No one 
else paints in his earthy, almost dull colors, or keeps so close to 
earth and the familiar in subject-matter. Very richly he has a sense 
of abstract form. I asked him about the making of the sketch for a 


238 


fe el RAID OU PAY P EAS ANE eG PRLS 
BY MAURICE STERNE 


painting which is here reproduced. He said that he drew it while 
knee-deep in flowing water, looking downstream into the woods; 
but that his friends called it Penetration—which came nearer to his 
intention. I leave the reader to struggle with the balance of objec- 
tive and abstract elements in such an approach. | 


One misses the modern intensity of color in Dove; but I am 


239 


REDWOODS, BY ARTHUR 8B DA eee 


reminded that Walkowitz occasionally brings in something without 
color at all, and has the very quality we have been talking most 
about. See his drawing, New York. And Walkowitz is at times, 
too, a decorator whom I would trust to do me‘a colored panel before 
almost any other artist | can name. Weber was an early Cezannist, 
one of the first American pioneers, with a fine talent, if a little 
derivative at times—from Cezanne, Picasso, Rousseau. His special 
gift, I should say, is for organization. He came near to grasping 
that structural thing beyond even Cezanne which the German 
Expressionists are so feverishly after. One watches for a little 
more passion, more color, a little firmer grasp of that structural 
thing, before suggesting a place with the three or four ranking 


figures. 


240 


awe BY ARTHUR B. DAVIES 


Arthur B. Davies pleases the conservative radicals more than any 
other American painter. He was revolutionary enough in the early 
days to get himself put down as a rebel, and he has always fought 
the good fight for open-mindedness and freedom of speech. Hewas 
individualistically poetic in a time when realism ruled, and later 
he grafted Cubistic flatness on to his delicate method. But Cubism 
gave him a surface variation rather than a spirit, or deeper struc- 
ture. He has remained his very charming, poetic, far-away self, 
lacking in modern power, directness, compactness—but sensitive, 
delicately colorful, inviting us to a sweet feminine refuge. With 
just a little more substance he might have demanded a place like 


Redon’s, as one of the Great Independents. As it is, he never seems 


241 


quite to belong to the true modernist group (perhaps we distrust his 
popularity!) and yet no one ever leaves him out. An individual, 
fine-tempered, lonely achievement. 

I explained once that I had no intent to be exhaustive. But even 
a primer must mention the names in so living a group as now 
flourishes (artistically speaking, not financially) in New York. 
There is Henry L. McFee, a sturdy painter who simply has the 
“quality” beyond dispute, and Preston Dickinson, whose drawing 
on page 244 is typical, and Charles Sheeler, a path-breaker who 
tries constantly to isolate “form” in both painting and photography. 
Man Ray is likewise intellectually interested in building pictures 
without affectation or flourish, and he has felt around in various 
media—even the air-brush of the “commercial artist” and the 
makeshifts of the Dadaists—but somehow I carry away reluctantly 
an impression of coldness and unemotional design. Then, too, 
Maurice Sterne is a man whose work in paints, black-and-white and 
sculpture, cautiously unconventional at first but latterly with the 
true ring, would arrest attention in any company; and Thomas 
Benton, who lacks color but gives a new significance to figure 
organization; and Macdonald-Wright, getting back from theoretical 
Synchromism to brilliant and appealing form-and-color composi- 
tions. And then someone asks, what of Oscar Bluemner, pictorial 
Cubist without being slave to Cubism, Samuel Halpert, important 
landscapist, Louis Bouché, who really ought to be a great painter 
but still only promises it, and William Yarrow, a certain ‘“‘comer,” 
and Walter Pach, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and the uncompro- 
misingly direct and very important Varnum Poore, and Henry 
Patrick Bruce, and Andrew Dasburg, and the clever artist-writer- 


242 


PORTRAIT! (BY ALBERY RLELOCH 


thinker Guy Péne Dubois, and Stuart Davis, and John Pandick, and 
Raymond Jonson out of the Middle West, and the developing 
groups in New Mexico and California, and Zoltan Hecht and the 
Zorachs, and Gardner Hale and Rockwell Kent and Warren 
Wheelock and... 

Well, the answer is that these men in the aggregate are so impor- 
tant, promise so fine a continuation of the modernist idea, that one 
simply cannot overlook them; but to do them justice would mean 
a book on American Expressionism alone. 


If one could bring together with these the several Americans who 


243 


WASHINGTON “BRIDGE, 
BY PRESTON: DICKENS oe 


are largely expatriates—Feininger from Germany, Macdonald 
Wright and Russell from Paris, Epstein and Kauffer and Anne 
Estelle Rice from London—and bring from Chicago and St. Louis 
and New Mexico and California some bits of Western strength and 
native boldness—why then . . . then . . . then what? 

Well, well, one wonders. Perhaps the revelation of so much 
that is new and untrammeled and nakedly expressive would give 


the academicians that long overdue shock, they would drop dead 


244 


Nie wEXTCO, BY MARSDEN HARTLEY 


(as an Institution), and the radicals would have their galleries for 
a real show—and it would be such a show as would cheer the 
pioneers, because they would see that young America is alive, that 
there is a generation of art-seekers here, as in France and in Ger- 
many, who know that illustrative painting is dead, who love paint 
and color and give rein to their emotions. It would be an Event, 
because it would all be living art. And of course the Metropolitan 
Museum would come forth on that day, and buy another Davies out 
of the exhibition, to show that it is up-to-date. 


By the “anatomy” of modern art I mean the structure of the 
several arts interdependently. To study contemporary painting 
alone is like dissecting a leg to discover what makes a man live and 


breathe. In critical accounts of the fine arts, and in journalism, 


245 


painting stands for what is “Art” more than any other member— 
although music, the theatre and literature long have touched the 
general public more vitally. Architecture, which should be 
the mother art, without which painting and sculpture are derelicts, 
has been out of the way of creativeness so long that it comes as a 
surprise to many to find it mentioned where art is concerned. But 
the hopeful thing about the present movement is that all the arts are 
concerned, architecture no less than painting, music no less than 
sculpture. 

Painting, many centuries ago, took leadership among the visual 
arts. It is only natural, then, that painting should have experienced 
the real break into a new epoch. In becoming an independent and 
self-sufficient art, in divorcing itself from architecture, painting 
played some strange tricks. It left architecture with a coldness, a 
colorlessness, which still cramps and chills. It invaded the stage 
background, and gave an utterly untheatrical and pictorial quality 
to theatre art, an alien bias that has remained down to the present 
revolution. In taking the leadership it drew sculpture into many a 
false path—till even the brush-swing feeling was imitated in stone. 
Painting really isn’t fit for leadership—nor will it have that leader- 
ship long if architects wake up to their present opportunities. 

In dividing the balance of this book into chapters on architecture, 
sculpture and the theatre, I have no intention to suggest that the 
“new movement” in these arts is any more important or any more 
marked than in music or literature. But my scope was planned to 
cover only the visual arts. Besides, I confess freely that I am even 
more ignorant about music than about these others, and would not 


be led into saying more than that the same new freedom from 


246 


SeGLUStTON;, BY MAX WEBER 


cramping traditions seems to have been won for the Junge Kunst 
composers, the same directness and fearlessness is evident in the 
treatment of “materials,” a youthful, more intense spirit prevails. 
Intenseness—concentration—jazz! Well, that too has had _ its 
effect; but it is seen pretty clearly to be Dadaish and catchy. Real 
music goes deeper. Incidentally there is the same old cry from the 
academicians: “Ugliness! Discords! Bolshevism!” But new emo- 
tional beauties are brought to release. 

In literature, one finds the parallel in free verse, in the Imagist 
~ movement, in the breaking down of older forms in fiction. There 
are similar outlines and exactly parallel applications: the general 
swing away from realism, and the search for a form that will be 
typically of the materials, spoken words and idea-symbols; the 


attempt to banish “dead spots,” the search for the intensified image, 


247 


the grasping of slang, of tabooed words and ideas—anything for 
greater expressiveness. 

If we were to chart the anatomy of the thing, not only would it 
show all these as major members, all growing vigorously, but there 
would be parts named for caricature, for etching and woodcutting 
(you really ought to see the inside of a German Expressionist print 
shop!), for the crafts, pottery-painting, poster design, book-making 
(this is not an example of Expressionist manufacture), textiles, 


whatnot? For this body is unified by a spirit. 


PAINTED.) (PO TCR aa 
BY VARNUM POOR 


XIII 


SCULPTURE: IMPRESSIONISM 
TO CUBISM 


, 
, 
¥ 
ew ’ 
* sy e E 
. ~ > 
- 7 — bee ‘ 
- _ 
“ ee + ¢ 
A : art > " 
‘ Sa oy; 
~ 
: ‘~ ‘ » ee 8 Seat, Beate) Mel ee ee 
Ai ih | es ke, ahs ne eite € 
, b . i “< ( . 
Lens ae «ald ‘ oy Oh hE we) eee See 
4 * ¥ F ‘ Le ; 
- 4 aN ; 
; 3 » . © : - 
. ‘ . i 
, : ; ye > i 
; xf 
. $ bal ? ; ; 
- “= < -~ i 1) Bi ee . 7 aa es 
~ ‘ bet 5 } + , 
> e . » 7A - - “- % “— to 
. : ; 
4 1 
\ 
: 
-“ re "4 , 
= : ‘ 
; La 
x pee, SSS AEE Ard Tas 
» s ’ 
. - “al m » 
* Y 
“s ~ 
t 
- 
‘ 34 : Fi ra 
ti : 
} € . 
* 
7 + 
« ” 
é f 
> L, : 
- = + ; 
~ % “ 
" < Fe : Ki; i 
. = . 
= - 
, 
/ £ oot 
, 
as . 
~ oe 46 
' 
Mi ei 
. 4 . 
t ‘ 
< 
‘y 
. 
: i 
: 
\ 
i 
- 


REeEPOSE, BY ARCHITPEN KO 


HIS, dear reader, is an example of modern sculpture. It is 

an extreme example. It is not like the statues you see at 

the Academy exhibitions. Nor is it like the be-au-tiful statues of the 

Greeks. It is not like many things in the Metropolitan Museum— 

although you may find hints of it in the sculpture of some very 

ancient peoples. You probably do not feel that it is pretty. The 
sculptor did not intend that it should be pretty. 

The sculptor, nevertheless, had a very definite artistic purpose. 

He probably was not wholly successful. He may even have lapsed 


into a thing which may be called decadent modernness: a sort of 


251 


“ 


flabbiness of the spirit, a rottening of the esthetic perception. But 
this is not to be mistaken for the typical works of the decadents who 
are hypocritically vulgar, who practice a delicate sophisticated sort 
of perversion. It has a quality. The sculptor was seeking that 
thing which some of us believe to be the most essential quality of 
great sculpture, a thing which was largely lacking in Rodin and in 
St. Gaudens and in all the realistic-pictorial sculptors, which was 
totally lost by Carpeaux and by the Neo-Classicists beyond him 
and by the Baroque sculptors beyond them, and which can hardly 
be detected in Praxiteles or Donatello or Daniel Chester French. 
But it was in the Egyptians, in the works of certain Chinese periods, 
in the early Greeks, in Michael Angelo. And it is that which the 
modernist sculptors are after. 

It corresponds to the quality that Cezanne sought beyond all else 
in painting, the quality so besought by the later Expressionists that 
they are willing to abandon all likeness to the surface look of nature 
and all refinement and prettiness of painted surface, if only they 
can achieve some slight revelation of it. In the field of sculpture 
it may best be described, perhaps, as expressive sculptural form. 

Now it might seem that the things most talked about in connection 
with the modern painter’s seeking for form—structure, volume and 
an extra dimension—would come readily to the sculptor’s hand, 
simply because he works in three dimensions as against the two of 
painting. That is a shallow conception of sculptural form. It is 
the dimension beyond the obvious seeable ones, that counts most 
eesthetically, the unmeasurable dimension beyond the two of paint- 
ing or the three of sculpture. 3 


In its negative aspects, modernist sculpture corresponds closely 


252 


Mira, BY GASTON ELACHAISE 


to modernist painting. The representative element is relegated to a 
wholly minor importance. If one is to enjoy these works at all, one 
must get freely back to the point of considering sculpture as sculp- 
ture, with a truth of its own, without a reservation that first it must 
imitate accurately and neatly some observed aspect of nature. 
Similarly “finish,” both in the Victorian pretty sense, and in the 
sense of the Impressionist’s obsession with the surface play of light, 


becomes merely an incidental issue. Show and flourish, in the 


253 


od 


Rococo sense and as decoration (as in Beaux-Arts architecture) are 
absolutely disavowed. If these modern sculptors are successful, 
it will not be for the amazing life-likeness of their immediate prede- 
cessors, or for the pretty rounded “purity” of Thorwaldsen and 
Canova, or for ornament’s sake. This typical uncompromising 
head by Gaston Lachaise is far from being either a pretty photo- 
graph or an inconsequential bit of decorativeness—is indeed the 
very opposite of “show” sculpture. 

I am insisting on the sense of sculptural form as a basis for both 
creation and appreciation, because it seems to me perhaps easier to 
grasp than form in painting. When you do grasp it, dropping the 
“classical” notions which are fixed on us by our common-university 
and lecture-course educations, you will find new doors of esthetic 
enjoyment opened to you, not only among the moderns but with the 
Chinese, the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Mycenzans. 

I probably have a mind that is sculptural rather than painty. 
I do not get half so excited over the idea of creating paintings as I~ 
do over the thought that»-I might create in stone masses. When 
I think sculpture, I feel rock and mountains, space occupied .and 
space around, voluminous balance of masses, serenity, repose. The 
figure by Archipenko, whatever may be its demerits, has something 
of the mountainous feeling. And there is silent rock quality in the 
Lachaise head. 

Each separate art has its limitations and its essential values. 
It was no virtue in sculpture that it was able to become pictorial, 
even sketchy, through a considerable period. Its particular virtue 
lies in something not suited to picture-treatment, not fitted for illus- 


tration. Its materials, stone and metal, are hard, heavy, intractable. 


254 


Lightness of effect in the finished work is only a lying quality. 
Sculptural form—not the accidental form it takes from the natural 
aspect of its subject, but the essential thing—lies, as nearly as 
anyone has been able to put it, in related masses, in the repose of 
balanced volumes, in created arrangement of masses. That is the 
soul of sculpture. 

One might break up this problem and say that the volumes, the 
masses, depend upon the flow of planes, surfaces and slopes. That 
is merely transferring the idea to the dimensions which we can see. 
In the same way it is possible to say that the problem of sculpture is 
a problem of how light falls on a shaped mass or arranged planes: 
it is the light and shade that make the statue intelligible to us. 
True—but that is getting farther and farther away from the heart 
of the art. Rodin got lost in that maze, fell victim to his passion 
for light and shade—partly the rather squeaky light values of the 
contemporary Monet-Impressionist school of painters, and partly 
the organ-tone shadows of Rembrandt which he thought he could — 
realize in stone. He largely saw sculpture by shadows, and there- 
fore by lines creating deep shadows and by minute hollows varying 
shadows. But that is pictorial rather than sculptural conception. 
And Rodin will go into history as the unrivalled giant of the period 
when sculpture approached closest to pictorial art. The Kiss is 
typical of all the values to be achieved along that road, and of the 
lost sculptural repose and amplitude. But we will come back to 
Rodin, because he is important as marking the breaking point. 

Some conventional sculptors, learning that lesson, have avoided 
deepcut shadows, have “kept the work white’”—but merely that 


cannot make them modern. Others have practiced habitual sim- 


255 


al 


plification of natural forms, as if that were the gate to the lost 
region of creativeness. Of those others who jumped to geometrical 
equivalents for natural forms—the “surface” Cubists—I shall have 
more to say later. Of “distortion” in general, for emotional or 
formal intensification in sculpture, I can only repeat that the mod- 
ernists don’t much care how close to natural aspects you hold, or 
how far from nature you stray, so long as you put expressiveness 
into your work. Some of the finest art of the past has been heedless 
of visual accuracy; distortion really means nothing one way or the 
other on its own account; people will come to consider it an inessen- 
tial again if the living sculptural-emotional form is there. 

I grant you that it sometimes looks funny at first: such bulbous 
limbs, such attenuated torsos, a noseless head. But if you are 
really open-minded, not choked up with a lot of theories and irrele- 
vant knowledge, you will not notice. You should have spent less’ 
time observing people on the bathing beach, and more with the 
seated Saite figures and the negro ritual masks. Your education 
has probably been too physical-cultural and photographic. - 

Of the history of sculptural art it is hardly necessary to say more 
than that there have been periods when form was more valued than 
imitation, directness of expression more than ‘surface refinement. 
The primitive peoples link up as arule. Greece began to slide into 
mere prettiness and imitativeness by the time of Phidias, although 
it would be a fanatical modernist who would rule out from the 
world’s masterpieces the early vigorous works. Rome was first 
imitative, then productive of the most vulgarly realistic display in 
the history of the art. The Middle Ages produced some fine 


Expressionistic things, and the Romanesque period is full of sculp- 


256 


mie KRESS; BY RODIN 


ture that is perfectly a part of an expressive architectural whole. 
The high Gothic and late Gothic lapsed to weak representation. 
A vigorous Michael Angelo stands out vividly, escaping the general 
prettifying and intellectualizing of the Renaissance. Followed the 
Baroque and Rococo, then the Neo-Classic, both far from the essen- 
tial thing. Then came what the histories term “modern sculpture.” 

Realism overspreads the world. Some sculptors are more indi- 


vidualistic, others are eclectic. Some are robust, others are light 


257 


and sentimental. But all are true to their new-found faith in 
observation. Rude varies the formula melodramatically. Car- 
peaux apotheosizes “show.” Hildebrand gives an intellectualist’s 
reasonableness to modern life in Greek dress. St. Gaudens puts a 
plausible nobility into our American monuments—in place of the 
insipid chemised ladies and hideous frock-coated gentlemen of an 
earlier day. Sculpture has come to its highest point in pictorial 
fluency, monumental illustration. Even so frankly pictorial a 
monument as the Shaw Memorial is endowed with noble composi- 
tion and an architectural completeness—but it is not typically 
sculptural. 

At this point let us take note of certain facts: the sculptor had in 
general given up cutting his own stone—he was a modeller, and 
skilled workmen translated his “design” to stone or bronze. The 
sculptor thus had no reason to conceive with that sort of sculptural 
emotion that rises from a passion for his materials; and combined 
with this, he had learned to rely more upon observation of nature 
than upon any subjective emotion of his own. ‘He had in general 
a vague idea of combining Greek finish with modern scientific 
observation of life. He was mimetic, a clever portraitist, and 
estimable as an upholder of patriotism and the capitalistic state 
through the easy fluency of his show monuments. But something 
of eternal art was passing him by. 

The final phase of the era of realism developed in the last quar- 
ter of the 19th Century. Even in sculpture it may conveniently 
be called Impressionism, although the term needs some further 
elucidation when used in this connection. As a matter of fact 
Impressionism, implying a certain sketchiness, is almost an impossi- 


258 


bility in true sculpture, i.e., cut stone; but in what currently passed 
for that art, in modelling, Impressionism made itself fairly plaus- 
ible and popular—and indeed is stiii the end and substance of four- 
fifths of the works of our facile exhibition modellers of today. 

Auguste Rodin touched the peak of purely naturalistic sculpture, 
then gathered to himself all of the glory and the blame that the 
world was ready to bestow on Impressionism in sculpture, and 
finally started on a too-long-deferred search for a new form. 

This giant, this great outstanding figure of the last half of the 
19th Century, might alone serve as a foil against which to make 
clear the development of the “newer sculpture.” There will be 
many to cry out against this blasphemy, to say that Rodin was 
greater than any who has come since. But his greatness is only 
the greatness of an amazing naturalism at first, and then of Impres- — 
sionism. It has qualities more insinuating than anything in Manet 
or Monet. It has sweet surface appeal, and associative appeal of 
subject, and a cunning trick of half-concealment, of implied mysti- 
cism and possible profoundness. But it lacks one great essential 
element of sculpture., 

Of Rodin’s early naturalistic work—itself a revolt against the 
showy qualities of Carpeaux and the contemporary French school— 
it is hardly necessary to do more than mention The Age of Bronze 
and John the Baptist, which are widely known through replicas in 
many museums and through repeated illustration in books and 
periodicals. The quality of these is made clear by the incident 
which occurred when The Age of Bronze was first exhibited at the 
Salon of 1877. This single poised figure was so exactly and 


minutely modeled that the sculptor was accused of an imposition. 


259 


wd 


Fellow artists declared that to obtain such fidelity he must have 
taken casts from life. In order to disprove the charge, Rodin was 
obliged to take casts from parts of his original model, and show 
how they differed from his statue. Realism triumphant, in its illu- 
sion of nature, and its slight variance from nature! 

Rodin lived through the entire fight waged by the Impressionist 
painters, and it would be idle to suppose that he failed to test his 
own art by their discoveries. When one studies his sculpture with 
the works of the Impressionist painters—say, Monet and Pissarro— 
in mind, certain parallels become clear. . 

One is in the matter of pose. The Impressionist painters sought 
above all else to record a single fleeting aspect of a scene, often 
having to sacrifice structure and other qualities to the catching of 
this “impression.”” Rodin employed models to walk nude about his 
studio so that he could catch them unexpectedly in sudden revealing 
attitudes, and he would fix those in clay. There, certainly, is the 
parallel of the painted “aspect.” . 

There is, too, a sculptural counterpart of Monet’s achievement of 
vibration-of-light. If he laid on his pigments in a way to catch the 
light more brilliantly than any predecessor, Rodin may be said to 
have made sculpture more luminous than any before his time. He 
kept the larger masses of his pieces—I am thinking of the long line 
of works like The Danaid, The Kiss, The Eternal Idol and Satyr 
and Nymph—open and uninvolved, with full surfaces toward the 
light; and he varied these surfaces with bosses and hollows so 
minute (though natural) that there is a constant subtle play of half- 
obscure dark-and-light. The effect is spontaneous and sweetly 


flowing to a degree unknown in the history of sculpture. It is 


260 


Boe wea NCER, BY GEORG KOLBE 


realism made atmospheric, the “lightness”’ of painted Impression- 
ism grafted on to the heaviest of mediums. 

These painters, too, made a point of fading off their pictures at 
the edges, and Rodin creates a not dissimilar effect by failing to 
work his figures entirely out of the marble block. The ground 
is purposely thrown out of focus to make the statue stand out the 
more clearly by contrast. This method, which must be looked upon 


as something of an affectation, increases the sense of concentration, 


261 


and occasionally it helps to preserve that essentially sculptural feel- 
ing of massiveness which the Impressionist method is in general 
bound to destroy. This, then, is the great Impressionist, his the 
type of sculpture against which a revolt was ‘inevitable when a new 
generation came thinking new thoughts and dreaming new sculp- 
tural dreams. For despite his escape from the prettily rounded 
limbs and the sweet, smooth surfaces of an earlier school, and 
despite his avoidance of the typical Beaux-Arts flourish, Rodin was 
not modern in the post-Realistic sense. His surfaces were lively 
with variation, his restrained masses confined powerful movement, 
his figures achieved a certain sense of life; but he missed the mas- 
sive architectural feeling of later work, his “movement” was not of 
Cezanne’s voluminous sort, his sense of life not that living quality 
of Lehmbruck or Epstein. Despite his nursed concentration and 
his affectation of the broken block and spontaneous creation—which 
some commentators have confounded with the directness and divine 
heedlessness of the real moderns—he remained the inspired sensi- 
tive naturalist. Meier-Graefe put it in a few words: “His magic 
breathes Nature, that is its strength. There is not a single detail in 
his work which is not the outcome of a natural impression.” 

Rodin bred a whole school of sculptors with Impressionistic 
traits, but none has ever succeeded in reaching his perfection of 
rippling surface texture and absolute faithfulness of pose. Most 
of his followers have unconsciously been more honest than he in | 
that they recorded their impressions in clay rather than marble. 
Some of these followers carried the method to the absurd extreme 
of sketchiness and dim outline: notably Medardo Rosso with his 
soft-focus photographic Impressionism, and Bistolfi with his pretti- 


262 


Bou ZA Ces BY RODIN 


fied and painty figures which exact spontaneity at whatever cost to 
sculptural solidity. Other followers glorified Rodin’s subtle bosses 
and hollows into an intensely disagreeable sort of bulgy realism 
which supposedly substitutes “power” for repose. But these were 
only tag ends of decadent realism, and it is from Rodin’s work that 
I have chosen two of my illustrations of Impressionism. One is 
The Kiss, because it illustrates as well as anything of the period the 
best qualities of Impressionism in sculpture. The other is that 
famous sketch for a Balzac monument wherein Rodin went beyond 


his own previous limitations, and arrived at a summary treatment 


263 


of nature which led many a critic to align him with the ultra- 
moderns. But it is to be noted that this is only a partial surrender 
to sculptural emotion: the idea is realistic, and realism somehow 
breathes from the statue. 

A third illustration added for contrast to post-Impressionism is 
George Kolbe’s Dancer, an example of the eclectic sort of art 
practiced by a wise group of contemporary sculptors, gaining in 
surface and pose from Rodin, but clever enough to avoid any effort 
to imitate his highly individual method of realistic concentration. 
A remarkably graceful and seductive bit of sculptural illustration 
it is—and by a man who has since forsaken illustration to do 
notable things in starkly simple composition. 

There was no Cezanne in sculpture. No one artist marks the 
sudden break from Rodin into the slope called post-Impressionistic. 
There was, in between, a time which I can only call “the honest 
period.” It was like architecture in this, the really modern archi- 
tects having arrived at new forms not directly as a recoil from the 
eclectic, imitative period, but out of a period of new respect for 
engineering and common-sense building. Just so a few sculptors 
returned quietly to the basic principles of sculpture. 

First they inquired what was the essential quality suggested or 
determined by the heavy and plastic materials in which they must 
work—and they arrived at a certain massiveness. Second, they 
inquired whether the pictorial values developed under Impres- 
sionism, the straining for revealing pose and sketchy finish, were 
essentially sculptural—and they escaped from the burden of pic- 
torial and literary inessentials. And third, they conceived, instinc- 


tively rather than consciously, that there is something that can be 


264 


called essential sculptural form. They quite clearly found joy in 
seeking this sort of form—but still within the limits of normal 
aspects—seen honestly. 

Several names might enter into the story here, if this book were 
altogether dedicated to sculpture: Anton Hanak, Austria’s greatest 
sculptor; Jan Stursa, and that Jane Poupelet who is happily just 
coming into the height of her powers. But the period is perfectly 
summarized in the work of Aristide Maillol. Of him Meier-Graefe 
wrote nearly twenty years ago: “Maillol is perhaps the first 
Frenchman since the Gothic artists who shows no traces of the 
Baroque.” There was something prophetic in the words, and cer- 
tainly it was a good beginning; no trace of flourish, of sophisticated 
stylism, of show elements. After that, absolute freedom from any 
desire to be descriptive, to show a figure in a discovered or arranged 
pose; and no over-exaltation of finish. Here was a return to 
fundamentals. 

Maillol is direct where Rodin is ingenious, simple in spirit where 
Rodin achieves simplicity of effect out of a marvelous actual com- 
plexity. Maillol is little interested in either violent movement or 
the tense quivering figure. The posed ecstatic moment of Rodin, 
the peculiarities of pose and gesture avidly sought by the Impres- 
sionists—these would disturb the repose and serenity of his sculp- 
tured figures. He equally disavows any desire to compete with the 
littérateurs in clay or the illustrators. His thought and mode are 
based on a conception of sculpture as a massive, quiet art. 

Maillol is debtor to Rodin in one matter, in that the latter 
brought a new seriousness to the study of surface. But the newer 


man shapes it for vigor and for the sake of the broader mass, 


265 


SEATED FIGURE, 
BY ARISTIDE MAZTELOL 


instead of breaking it up for atmospheric play of light. That 
sweetly flowing quality of Rodin’s marble, the shimmer of minute 
variations of surface, which one never ceases to wonder at, would 
be no gain to Maillol’s art of simple contours and balanced vol- 
umes. The fine amplitude of his work could only be disturbed by 
Impressionistic “lightness.” 

Here then in the negative sense, at least, is true post-Impressionist 


sculpture. It has cut behind all the falsities of pictorial conception 


266 


which characterized the art from the Renaissance to Rodin. Sculp- 
ture has become again a thing in itself, not a means of imitating a 
thing seen. It conveys emotion rather than a thought or aspect. It 
has character of its own rather than the character of a model. It 
preserves the life of the material in which the artist worked. It is 
ihe negation of Realism. 

I am ready to grant that. Maillol’s work is post-Impressionistic 
chiefly in the negative sense of being a return. If one is thinking 
of the out-and-out modernists, the distortionists and the Expression- 
ists, It is necessary to make distinctions and reservations here. The 
bulk of the modernists have gone beyond merely a returned honesty, 
directness and simplicity. Those later men frankly abandon fidel- 
ity to natural form if thereby they can hope to intensify emotion or 
sculptural feeling. Maillol, in spite of all his contempt for realis- 
tic interest, never violates the accepted visual aspects of nature. He 
simplifies, summarizes and selects, but he keeps discreetly within 
observed natural normality. He returns to honest structural princi- 
ples and a plastic substantiality, and one feels that there is a mathe- 
matical basis beyond; but he never attempts to “cube” the outward 
aspect, never distorts the figure to gain intensity. If he achieves a 
fourth dimension, he always does it after arranging the other three 
in natural order. He goes half the way with the moderns: he seeks 
form, but he sacrifices no broad visual truth to intensify it. 

Here then is a giant of his own time. His is an achievement 
which will not interest readers the less for being not quite so mod- 
ern, in the sense of increased intensification through distortion, as 
is Archipenko’s or Epstein’s. And it is to be added that no artist 


of the later era has achieved in his own time a success quite as 


267 


complete as Maillol’s in his between-times period. Even the most 
exclusive of the later moderns grants him esthetic validity. He 
won his half of the fight superbly. The Seated Figure shown here 
exhibits a completeness that to some of us is more satisfying than 
anything ever done by an Impressionist or other realist. It lives in 
its own right, without any necessity of associative interest of subject 
or symbolism. The architectural panel (page 308) is no less re- 
markable for the quality of fullness, completeness. The illustra- 
tion of the mask of a woman is added here because it so typi- 
cally belongs to the chapter in sculptural history which lies between 
Rodin and Epstein. 

Before going on to Epstein and his fellows, however, it is neces- 
sary to say a word about the return to honesty in relation to the 
question of the archaic, and particularly about naiveté. Maillol 
in going back to something solidly structural, exhibits a massiveness 
and sheerness that have led to talk of primitive influences. He 
doubtless learned to value something finely heavy by a study of 
archaic works, but he has not returned to archaic conventions. His 
simplicity is elemental but by no means primitive. Particularly he 
lacks the naive touch. Naiveté implies a child-like quality: the 
vision and directness of the child who will draw a cat and a house 
of the same size, or a green cow, and see no absurdity in it. It 
would be well if we could all understand intuitively that such vio- 
lations of accidentals in Nature are inconsequential. But Maillol 
never asks us to overlook a distortion. Even educated people— 
provided they have not been trained so dry that they look for illus- 
tration and illusion above all else—can enjoy his statues. It re- 


mained for a later group to cultivate the naive approach. 


268 


ert tea TT 


Hee woOr A GURL, BY ARISTIDE IMALILLOL 


“Ff 


Certain types of archaic conventionalization have become a pretty 
trick with many sculptors. A little while back there was much dis- 
cussion of “formalization” as a desirable quality. This is not to 


be confused with the search for “form” which plays so large a part 


269 


in modernist art. It is rather a surface quality, a handling in con- 
formance with explicit conventions: like the “archaic smile” or 
Greek formalization of the hair. 

As a post-Impressionist phase, in time, formalized sculpture can- 
not be overlooked, and it may be exceedingly graceful and agree- 
able. It belongs, nevertheless, outside that slope of sculpture which 
parallels the Cezanne-Expressionist slope in painting. It is not 
without its backing of critical opinion, that would label it the truly 
modern development; and its chief practitioner in America, Paul 
Manship, has been heralded widely as the most promising and most 
talented of the new generation of native sculptors. 

Nothing could be more graceful and pleasing within the limita- 
tions adopted by the artist than this Dancer and Gazelles, and noth- 
ing could be more typical of the movement as a whole. Manship 
has had periods of Greek formalization, Oriental formalization, and 
Italian Renaissance formalization, each easily recognized. That 
very versatility is an indication of the shallow rather than profound 
influences to which the formalizing sculptors have subjected them- 
selves. They hold to certain rigidities and simplifications because 
those things produce agreeable effects. It is a sort of decorative 
conventionalization, a clever bit of craftsmanship in finishing, 
which has little to do with the soul of sculpture. Manship’s work 
is almost invariably charming, delicate and in perfect taste, but it 
has little emotion and certainly no sculptural passion (I use the 
term thoughtfully). It is perhaps perfect decorative illustration— 
and that is a deal better than perfect transcriptive illustration. 

One might follow this lead to treat of the work of the Servian 
Mestrovic, who applies a sort of formalization to brutally heavy 


270 


Peewee ReaD. GAZ CLES, BY sPAUL MANSHIP 


subjects; or of Hunt Diederich, who more than any other American 
designs with that sure decorative touch and stylistic appeal which 
we have noted as characteristic of Viennese art; or of the French 
Bourdelle, who is really very important, although only recently has 
he escaped from the realistic Rodin influence, to begin formalizing 
with a fine architectural feeling—and occasionally to get over into 
the field of form-seeking. 

But what of Cubism and sculpture? At superficial glance it 
would seem that the Cubist method would apply to glyptic or plastic 


art as an immediate aid to the securing of essential massiveness 


a 


271 


Fo GAER Ee 
BY EDWIN -S6©H ARMs 


and simplification. Hardly so simple. Cubism as applied to paint- 
ing was designed to develop another dimension, was a means to 
achieving synthesis. To use cubism in simply the ordinary geomet- 
rical sense in sculpture would mean nothing comparable because 
that art is already three-dimensional—and thus literally cubic. An 
application of the doctrine in spirit would mean seeking a further 


dimension. It has, indeed, proved its value only when it turned the 


272 


attention of the sculptors to that hidden thing, truly a fourth dimen- 
sion—to a seeking for volume and balanced masses in a new sort of 
relationship. 

Most so-called Cubist sculpture has been only the old sculpture 
with the planes flattened out—the application in letter rather than 
spirit. Important people like Archipenko and Scharff and Jan 
Stursa went through Cubist “periods”? and doubtless emerged with 
an enriched equipment, with a deeper sense of the structural thing 
that underlies life and art. 

The man who has made most out of the technical peculiarities of 
Cubism is William Wauer, whose head of Rudolf Bluemner is 
shown with the chapter on Cubism. One feels that here is a thing 
that gains vigor and a certain suavity by the simplifying of planes 
and the accentuation of angles separating planes. Despite the well- 
realized structure of the head, however, it is hardly to be counted 
great sculpture. Its arresting qualities are, in the last analysis, 
representative and technical. It smacks a little of merely giving 
natural forms a simplified geometrical equivalent. 

Somewhat more serious consideration should be given, perhaps, 
to Teidors Zalkaln’s Scriabin. In it (page 44) the flattening 
of planes is accomplished with more sculptural feeling, and there 
is evidence of creative seeking in the relationship of the broader 
masses or blocks. If one were able to draw a line between realism 
and Expressionism in sculpture, one might find it illuminating to 
study out just how close Rodin’s Balzac comes to the line, but 
within the realistic territory, and how close this Scriabin is to the 
line, but on the “seeking for form” side. I leave it to the reader to 


ponder this if he is interested. Meantime the Bolsheviki have set 


273 


? 


EVENING 
BY JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE 


274 


up the Scriabin in stone in a Petrograd square, while Balzac, re- 
fused by an indignant Bourgeoisie in France, is relegated to a 
corner of the Rodin Museum. The soul of modernism seems to go 
marching on! 

There is no reason why the sculptor who considers his art pri- 
marily a question of related volumes and masses should not con- 
ceive those masses elementally as cubes. But flattening down nat- 
ural forms to a summary statement is not enough. If the statue is 
based on something seen in a model—is at least incidentally repre- 
sentative—the blocking down demands not only simplification of 
planes but a synthesis of planes and volumes, a synthesis of ob- 
served forms and conceived form. So far that synthesis has carried 
the more important sculptors in a direction where obviously Cub- 
istic traits are seldom noticeable. At any rate Archipenko, 
Duchamp-Villon, Gaudier, Lachaise and many of the other signifi- 
cant ones are better explained by a non-technical phrase like “Ex- 
pressionism.” 

Synthesis, however, is a word that particularly sticks in my mind 
in connection with the sculpture of John Mowbray-Clarke, who has 
long been a leader among the American radicals; and so I am put- 
ting an example of his work in here, before turning to those others. 
Mowbray-Clarke often gains effectiveness by flattening his planes, 
but that is only the start of the story; he stands closer than any fel- 
low-American to Hunt Diederich in a stylistic decorative touch, but 
that too is beside the central emotion. The point is that he does 
catch a living emotion in his modelled figures. Sometimes it is 
playful, sometimes even satiric—but if it is seldom profound, it is 


at least a creative rearrangement, an intensification of his emotion, 


275 


speaking to us directly, without flourish or swagger or dishonest bor- 
rowings from the other arts. I leave you with his emotion of three 


graceful ladies. 


THREE FREE, BY JOHN *MOWSRAY- CUA 


276 


* 


XIV 


SGUEPTURE: EXPRESSJONISM 


SEATED FIGURE, BY GAUDIER-BRZESKA 


XPRESSIONISM, as we have seen, is a term which implies no 
E technical formula, no codified laws of subject or treatment. 
It is broad enough to include the experimenters in absolute abstrac- 
tion, like Kandinsky, and those who seek instinctively to liberate 
form through and beyond reality, like Kokoschka and Marin. It 
is a label with as little doctrinaire implication as any that can be 
applied to a “movement” in art. It suggests, in baldest explanation, 
only that the artist has shifted from preoccupation with correct 
representation to a search for something in the nature of esthetic 
reality or expressive form. 

It is only by some such untechnical and inclusive word that one 
can group the bulk of the post-Impressionist sculptors. It has been 
suggested already how some of them went through a period of utiliz- 
ing Cubism merely as a diverting mask for representation, and how 
some achieved a certain sculptural blockiness and weightiness in 
their flattening of planes and their seeking of a new dimension in 
mass relationship. These latter touched over into Expressionism— 
and perhaps the heaviness of their work is the first obvious indica- 
tion. An Expressionist thinks heavy, if I may so put it, when he 
thinks sculpture. Part of his substitution for subject interest is the 
inherent virtue of his medium—in this case, of stone cutting. That 
virtue is as a rule expressive in massive volumes in relation. 

Because primitive peoples think more honestly in regard to ma- 


terials than civilized and sophisticated folk—who come to value 


279 


cleverness in imitating one material in another—primitive sculp- 
ture, whether pre-Greek, Egyptian, or Chinese, is usually solid, 
heavy, simple. It is for this reason that one so often sees the Ex- 
pressionist’s achievement of a typical sculptural massiveness her- 
alded as a return to the primitives. If achieved honestly, it is not 
a return at all, but an arrival at the same goal through a similar 
understanding of the qualities of stone. 

Coupled with this respect for materials—nay, love of materials 
—is the modernist’s directness of conception. His work is instinc- 
tively created, not reasoned or arranged in accordance with prin- 
ciples intellectually coded. Too much reasoning, inevitably in- 
volving a selective mode of working, leads to the addition of all 
sorts of adventitious trappings to a work of art, leads to high polish, 
symbols, and gencral prettiness. Emotional subjectivity is what 
counts, not intellectual. | ? 

Gaudier, or Gaudier-Brzeska, not a primitive in the imitational 
sense, was perhaps our best example of a sculptor who conceived 
with uncivilized directness, in both life and art. With a passion for 
stone and metal, he always reflected the virtues of these respective 
media in the finished work. He got closer to the heart of sculp- 
tural esthetics, too, than any other artist whose statements I have 
been able to find. Note how much is summed up in these three 
short sentences: 

“Sculptural energy is the mountain. 

“Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. 

“Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes.” 

Gaudier, writing from the trenches, told of “ninching” a Ger- 


man rifle in a raid, and how he carved a “gentler order of feeling” 


280 


Moiese ke AND CHILD, BY JACOB EPSTEIN 


out of the brutal “image” of the rifle-butt. That presumably was 
his last work of art. He would have appreciated the huge irony of 
his taking-off, by means of another German rifle that he failed to 
pinch—this naive-minded, direct-thinking, hugely-creative, gentle 
modern savage, utterly contemptuous of civilization, and then killed 
at twenty-four in civilization’s most civilized war. 

His own statement about the matter of reason and instinct, from 


a letter to The Egoist (quoted with all his other fugitive writings 


281 


in Ezra Pound’s book, Gaudier-Brzeska), also touches profoundly 
on points pertinent to all the moderns: 

“The archaic works discovered at Gnossos are the expressions 
of what is termed a barbaric people—i.e., a people to whom rea- 
son is secondary to instinct. The pretty works of the great flel- 
lenes are the productions of a civilized—i.e., a people to whom in- 
stinct is secondary to reason. .. . 

“The modern sculptor is a man who works with instinct as his 
inspiring force. His work is emotional. The shape of a leg, or 
the curve of an eyebrow, etc., etc., have to him no significance what- 
ever; light voluptuous modelling is to him insipid—what he feels 
he does so intensely and his work is nothing more nor less than the 
abstraction of this intense feeling. . . . That this sculpture has no 
relation to classic Greek, but that it is continuing the tradition of 
the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and 
admiration) I hope to have made clear.” 

But he cut statues as the archaic peoples did, not in weakened 
imitation of them. In his Seated Figure there is evident more of 
conscious “appreciation of masses in relation” than any true primi- 
tive is likely to have felt. But it is the absolute negation of “the 
pretty works of the great Hellenes’—whom he more feelingly 
terms elsewhere “those damned Greeks.” 

Pound comments on Gaudier’s peculiar “soft bluntness,” which 
excellently characterizes a certain pervading quality of modern 
archaic-like work. It a little misses the austerity and rigidity of 
much early Egyptian and Chinese sculpture—a difference covered 
by the word “soft.” But it all, even when the bluntness is as 


rounded and restrained as Franz Metzner’s, is innocent of the over- 


282 


Depot R ES BY QPRANZ “METZN ER 


refinement, both of mass and of surface, characteristic of ‘“‘classic” 
work. 

Metzner was the most discussed modern sculptor of Germany 
a decade ago; but today a good deal of his modernness seems a 
bit strained: realistic subjects formalized into massiveness, the 
heaviness obtained largely by a trick of conventionalization. And 
yet it achieves a degree of purely sculptural feeling long absent be- 
fore his time. And he has had incalculable influence on the 
younger generation of European sculptors. 

The living embodiment of the primitive “feeling for stone” is to 


be seen in Eric Gill. He advocates (with absolute justice) that the 


283 


name “sculptor” be denied to any man who does not cut his own . 
stone. Gill insists too that the work of art is its own justification, 
that it should be conceived in that way and not as an imitation of 
the appearance of something else, or as a work which “conveys a 
criticism or an appreciation.” He has written a pamphlet about 
his art which sums up neatly several other modernistic principles: 
“The study of nature is not a prime necessity, though the love of 
nature may be such.” And: “The proper carving of stone results, 
and should so result, in a certain roundness and solidity of form 
with no detachment of parts.” , 

Again, as with Gaudier, it is instinct (love), non-representation, 
solidity of form. But most of all, with Gill, it is the feeling for 
stone, the evocation of some fourth-dimensional virtue that lies in 
the quality of his material. Could anything be more rock-like than 
this Torso? Of course if one has been educated almost exclusively 
to the look of rounded plaster casts of Greek and Roman statues, 
and to our polite eclectic sculptors (as most of us Americans have), 
it takes time to become accustomed to the rock look—but that is 
where the soul of sculpture lives. The existence of Eric Gill is the 
best sign I know for the future of art in England. 

There are other modern sculptors who do owe something to ac- 
tual copying of archaic conventions: I have already said a word 
about this apropos of Paul Manship and formalization. There is 
another direction that leads closer to the Expressionists. A fad for 
negro sculpture developed in Europe some years ago, and its ef- 
fects are apparent in the works of some really important artists. 
The French Post-Impressionists first became excited over these “bar- 


baric” carvings in wood, delighting in the directness of expression, 


284 


Ores OF BR Youre Rel Cr 3G LL LT 


the impersonality, and the naiveté of them. More recently the in- 
fluence has been rampant in Germany. There has been a consid- 
erable amount of loose rhapsodizing about this form of primitive- 
ness, which is in itself important up to a certain point, but usually 
lacking in some of the elemental and profound values inherent in 
certain archaic art periods. 

Negro sculpture is a healthful field of study for the average 


white sculptor because it is likely to give pause to his conceit, his 


285 


self-conscious show of virtuosity, his tendency toward over-refine- 
ment and flourish. These little idols, fetishes and masks are direct 
expressions of religious emotion and altogether impersonal. The 
sculptor approaches his work in humility, always feeling that he is 
less important than the figure he is carving. He has no eye on an 
ultimate “educated” spectator. His carving is for itself, out of his 
emotion. Is it any wonder that the European modernists, rebelling 
from a current mode of art characterized by cleverness and “show” 
above all else, should have hailed ecstatically such simple expres- 
sive beauty? Let one add, too, that negro art is formalized to the 
last degree, is innocent of any taint of naturalism—and it is easy 
to understand why Matisse, Picasso and the other fauves, and after 
them the German Expressionists, elevated these simple works to 


the level of their gods out of Egypt, China and archaic Greece. 


NEGRO SCULPTURE 


286 


NEGRO SCULPTURE 


And now, when the claim of negro sculpture is being examined 
a little more dispassionately, even the most level-headed critic, if 
he has any glimmering of what modern art is after, must recognize 
that these things are of more import than, for example, the art of 
the Roman era. (Consider carefully before you answer back, dear 
reader. ) 

To summarize the relationship of negro sculpture to modernist 
sculpture, I cannot do better than quote a paragraph written by 
Ladislas Medgyes: “All the peculiarities which were considered 
essential in the form language of negro sculpture are developed 
with the greatest intensity in the masks. The constructive beauty of 
the human face is retained as a basis, but freed from all sensual- 


ism. The eyes are more than human eyes; like deep lakes or tri- 


287 


umphal arches, they are almost geometrical, and still full of the 
greatest intensity of life. The nose as central axis plays an im- 
portant part in the composition, and is generally well developed as 
a high relief or deep incision. The free form-language can change 
the plus of a Cimension into a minus and even increase the har- 
mony of the composition thereby. . . . It is the rhythm of forms 
that determines this playing with positive and negative depth, and 
not the natural aspect of the object portrayed or suggested. .. . 
In spite of the strong deformation of visual aspect, the natural 
form remains the basis of creation, raised to such a high degree 
of concentration and objectivity that it becomes an independent, 
new being—a work of art.” 

Ceriain artists have so frankly copied or derived from the pe- 
culiarities of negro carved figures that there is no escaping the 
connection. Some are primarily painters, like Karl Schmidt-Rott- 
luff who has found occasional outlet for his gigantic primitive talent 
in wood sculpture; others, like Rudolf Belling and Emi Roeder had 
periods that showed the influence. Even so important an artist as 
Bernhard Hoetger seems in his most recent work to be attempting 
barbaric simplification tinged with negro conventions. But some- 
how the men who—whether the influence is negro or Egyptian or 
Hindu, or all these and more—synthesize all influences into some- 
thing of their own, are the ones who measure largest creatively in 
terms of today. 

Gaudier, a sculptor who must have seen, appreciated and ap- 
praised negro carved figures, arrived, in his Seated Figure, at a 
simplicity and an impersonality comparable to that of his African 


fellows, but without exhibiting any signs of indebtedness. The fact 


288 


that their work is less massive is partly due to the difference in ma- 
terial, but there is some other elemental quality here too—explain- 
able by the fact that civilization, while leading us into many paths 
that are dubious esthetically, has also enriched the vision of the 
artist who has remained unspoiled. 

Abstraction in sculpture. Gaudier again, going as near to ab- 
straction as the negroes, wrote somewhere that his experiments had 
made him believe that absolute abstraction was more suited to 
painting than to sculpture. He advanced two reasons: first, that 
the achievement of abstract beauty in a work of art usually in- 
volves a considerable complexity of forms, which could be encom- 
passed in a painting but would be prejudicial to the fundamental 
simple sculptural feeling; and second, that while painting has yet 
to explore almost the entire field of inorganic form, the sculptor 
has been anticipated by the designers of modern machinery. Gau- 
dier seems to have given up the attempt to compass pure abstrac- 
tions after doing a few inorganic “toys.” And those other sculp- 
tors who come nearest to abstract form seem to rely strongly upon 
some such (usually) incidental element as surface sensuousness or 
linear rhythm. 

Thus if I were pressed for an explanation of the attraction which 
Brancusi’s near-abstractions have for me, I would hazard that it is 
largely a sensuous surface appeal combined with creative massing 
of naked forms. In the Muse pictured here I feel that relating of 
masses which seems to me the nearest thing to pure and essential 
sculptural form that we can apprehend. But whether those related 
masses alone, without the faint basis in natural forms, and with- 


out the caressable, sensuous surface appeal, would speak to me as 


289 


MUSE. BY BRAN CUE 


strongly, I am not prepared to say. At any rate, Brancusi is one of 
the undoubted masters of near-abstraction and—legitimately or not 
—he adds a sensuous gloss to many of his architectonic composi- 
tions. 

Nearer to a wholly non-representative art is that of Oswald Her- 
zog, far less significant in achievement but pushing into new fields. 
His effort in one direction has come to the impasse suggested above: 


over-complexity, resulting in a wholly unsculptural spiky effect. 


290 


In another direction he is reduced to borrowing from another art, 
music. His attempts to build up form under titles like Harmony, 
Andante and Symphony are least successful when farthest removed 


from the forms of life. He can catch the thing in line, as in the 


» Andante * 


mn QGierz °s 


ANDANTE, BY OSWALD HERZOG 


Andante herewith, but the sculptural realization of this theme or 
conception only seems inept. 

What Herzog seems to be after is rhythmic abstraction in sculp- 
ture. That may be another name for expressive sculptural form; 
but in the search Herzog lets his consciousness wander over into 
the pastures of another art—a sort of betrayal of sculpture to 
music—or he tries to speak in terms of a feeling, experience or 
mood—Eruption, Erotik, Freude—and grasps at some symbol of 
experience which he hopes will convey the rhythm to the specta- 


tor. He is even less successful, it seems to me, than is Herta Muel- 


291 


ler-Schulda, who frankly composes for linear rhythm, as in this 
little Dancer. Her intention and the result are less deep—but she 


gets there! 


DANCER, 
BY HERTA MUELLER-SCHUDLURM 


The consideration of linear rhythm as an element leads naturally 
to the “sculpture-paintings” of Archipenko. Color in sculpture is 
not incompatible with the idea of an essential sculptural form. La- 
chaise has made some interesting things in that direction. But to 
mingle sculpture and painting in half-painted, half-relief panels 
seems even more inept than Herzog’s sculptured music. It simply 
does not register. I grant that it may be merely a personal lack of 
appreciation, but both here and in the case of Lipschitz’ relief pan- 
els, organized like near-abstract Cubist paintings, I am left cold. 


Jacques Lipschitz, however, makes a more interesting contribution 


292 


> some of which 


with what may be called his “block organizations,’ 
seem to open vistas toward a naked architecture, stripped of all petty 
excrescences of styles and ornament. Abstract (?) architecture and 
abstract sculpture would be one and the same if pursued down to 
the absolute, I suppose: the form-problem is the same. 

While we are considering Archipenko (who has done enough 
fine work to withstand even the enthusiasms of his friends for some 
of his wilder experiments), it is worth while to pause over his “non- 
being” statues. Let me quote from Ivan Goll’s pamphlet on Archi- 
penko, published by the Société Anonyme: 

“And so, after having utilized all the materials, and even their 
reflections, he hurls himself in pursuit of space and undertakes to 
mold, as he would clay, pure atmosphere. He makes ‘holes,’ mirac- 
ulous mirage. Phantasmagoria. All that we know and all that we 
are exists only in our imagination. Nothingness has an existence. 
That which is concave is also convex. Often the void seems to us 
as palpable as matter. And this is just what, in his most recent 
works, Archipenko assumes, when, instead of the head of a man 
or the breasts of a woman, he substitutes a hole—their non-being. 
The Artist-Creator reveals himself here; empty space surrounded 
by plastic shapes acquires in itself a personal form which gives us 
the same impression of vitality as the substance which it replaces.” 

It is always easy to be irreverent, and one is likely to note that 
the lady, the one with a stomach and not merely space expressive 
of one, has a pimple on it; and to speculate on the extreme appro- 
priateness of a void or vacuum in place of a head if certain of our 
friends were sitting for their portraits. But works of art should 


be considered only for their direct emotional or esthetic effect on 


293 


the spectator. The surprising thing is that, judged thus, these non- 
being statuettes turn out to be not only amusing but attractive with 
a certain sort of xsthetic validity, simply as suave form organiza- 
tions. 

When one has come to appreciate ali the kinds of sculpture I 
have described up to this point—and it has been a long way es- 
thetically—it will be time to go on to those compositions which one 
can only call “constructions.” I have seen whole rooms of them on 
exhibit, ranging from bits of pasteboard built into abstract figures 
to complex arrangements of wood and metal—sticks, wire, cog- 
wheels, blocks, discs, cylinders, etc.,—each attempting to achieve 
some balance or rhythm of line and form that is akin to an artistic 
creation. There can be no doubt that there is esthetic purpose 
here, because displacing a block or changing a fulcrum disturbs 
the “construction” in such wise that the feeling of “form”’ is lost. 
But I still am inclined to be skeptical—perhaps because the Dadaists 
ran away with that sort of thing—and I find that I get the same thrill 
more easily from the lines of an automobile or airship or in the 
power-house. And is it related to sculpture? 

I am painfully conscious that for several pages past we have been 
traveling in minor by-ways, well off the main road of progress in 
modern sculpture. But I wanted to give some idea of the amazing 
diversity of experiment, for that in itself holds a promise for the 
future. There not only is a remarkable group of sculptors in 
Europe and America who have come to the point of putting repre- 
sentation in a place secondary to some more essentially sculptural 
search, but there are scores of lesser artists feeling their way into 


every unexplored by-way of the three-dimensional art field. We 


294 


Peet ho, BY ARCHLPEN KO 


still are at the beginning rather than the height of a movement. But 
let us here get back to the men who are richer in actual achieve- 
ment. | 

Archipenko has entered into our deliberations at several points. 
He has achieved more kinds of acclaim than any other modern 
sculptor, simply because he has pried into so many unlighted cor- 
ners and brought out new, if not always sound ideas. There have 


been the matters of non-being sculpture, straight Cubist sculpture, 


295 


KNEELING FLGUR EQ DY WILHELM LEHMBRUCK 


296 


sculpture-paintings, abstraction, etc.—and he is one of the clever- 
est and most exact academic draughtsmen living today! His less 
arbitrary work shows real feeling for the relation of masses; and 
he has achieved elemental works like the Repose, shown at the open- 
ing of the last chapter, and sensuously appealing things like the 
Torso shown in the first chapter. He is important—and yet I sus- 
pect that I might name the half-dozen leading modernist sculptors 
without mentioning him. 

A man who consistently sought the soul of sculpture was Wil- 
helm Lehmbruck. He absolutely cast loose from the naturalistic 
burden, and his main objective was obviously to achieve something 
corresponding to what Cezanne called the “realization.” Lehm- 
bruck’s earlier statues might well be placed next to Maillol’s, in the 
honest between-periods group—I can think of no one more entitled 
to the place. But later a subtle sort of distortion of nature crept 
in, and was absolutely justified by the increased realization of the 
evasive pervading quality. Many of his figures lack the heaviness 
of most modernist work, and yet only at a loss that seems compen- 


99 


sated for, unexplainably, in the “set” of the piece. Even so at- 
tenuated a work as the famous Kneeling Woman, illustrated here, 
has an appearance of geometrical solidity. And it has a sensitive- 
ness, a flowing sense of form, a spatial adjustment, that are unique 
among modernists. 

How far Lehmbruck became careless of finish—utterly con- 
temptuous of that surface refinement which was a first objective of 
Western sculpture for so many centuries—is indicated in the Mother 
and Child, a work of his last period. It is an example of instinc- 


tive organization combined with Lehmbruck’s individual sensitive 


Zo 


distortion; and it is of exceptional interest here, perhaps, as exhib- 
iting the sculptural counterpart of that heedlessness in the search 
for form which characterizes so many of the Expressionist paint- 
ers: Kokoschka, Heckel, Nolde, etc. 

Here in America the search for form in sculpture is so far from 
evident in any usual exhibition that a work by Gaston Lachaise or 
Cecil Howard seems startling in the midst of so much that is self- 
sufficiently pretty and amusing. There are other progressive and 
important sculptors, to be sure: Maurice Sterne, Trygve Hammer, 
the mystic Alfeo Faggi, the intense Szukalski. But American sculp- 
ture in general is so clever, so graceful, so wholly ingratiating in 
a pictorial way, that one gets into the habit of accepting it at its face 
value, without asking for soul. What could be tenderer and more 
sensuously attractive than the polished marble nudes by a dozen 
clever artists—among whom recently Attilio Piccirilli is beginning 
to stand out as tenderest. This is the very counterpart in stone of 
that famous painting by Leighton, The Bath of Psyche, which has 
become the standard example of illustrated pink beauty (page 40). 
Indeed, whole sections of our sculpture shows could be called 
“Baths of Psyche” and no one to object. And there would be sec- 
tions of cleverly realistic animal studies—and cute animals and 
babes—and realistic Western anecdotes and realistic steel workers 
and immigrants. And a section for Paul Manship’s followers, 
formalizing dancing maids prettily; and a section for Daniel Ches- 
ter French (not without a certain nobility) and the other modellers 
of the perennial symbolic female; and a section for the showy men 
who haven’t learned that Carpeaux is dead; and the bulgy Rodin 


school in bronze and clay, and another Rodin school that tries in 


298 


Nr Ree AUN Do) CHE LD 
BY WILHELM LEHMBRUCK 


vain for his exquisite modulations in marble. . . . But these things 
are not modern, and a sort of essential and all-important sculptural 
form is the last conceivable thing any of the sculptors concerned 
could have had in mind. 

What is it, then, that Lachaise brings into our exhibition halls? 
Realized or only partly realized, it is that fourth-dimensional relat- 
ing of masses, combined with a total lack of sentimentality, literary 
trapping or surface decoration. The sheer solidity, the direct stone- 
like feel, of the marble head illustrated some pages back, is typical 
of the sort of structural simplification, with little distortion of nat- 
ural relationships, which characterized his earlier work. Another 
work shown, Woman, illustrates a characteristic attempt to pile up 
in sculptural form his emotional conception of the woman quality. 


This might serve as a study lesson for students of the modern, to 


299 


WOMAN, 
BY GASTON TLACHALSS 


determine how far the abstract relation of mass and volume deter- 
mines the result and how far the arbitrary balance of more or less 
natural forms: the small head and the mountainous breasts, the 
strong full torso and the tapering leg, etc. 

The Rising Woman by George Grey Barnard, more austere, and 


less distorted for emotional gain, might well be recalled here by 


300 


RISING*> WOMAN, 
BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 


way of analogy and contrast. It achieves the same massiveness in 
simpler relationships. It is the work of a man who saw, when 
Rodin’s Impressionism had come to rule the world of sculpture, 
a vision beyond Rodin. But there was no Expressionism in those 
days, no precedent for a man sick of precious surface qualities to 


cut and run regardless of all that the strface-sculptors valued. 


301 


Barnard tempered his insurgency rather with something he appre- 
hended out of the giants of other times, out of the strong early 
Greeks and particularly out of the anachronistic Michael Angelo. 
He is the only man I can think of who seems to combine a classic 
purity of language with a true modernist’s conception of form. 
Often the language controls, but there is enough of form in the 
Rising Woman alone to demand for him a place with the men here 
discussed. 

Jacob Epstein began by seeking sculptural form in its most 
stone-like and heaviest manifestations. But latterly he seems to 
have tried to combine his conception of the essential sculptural 
quality with a revelation of the soul of his model. He has gone 
down through realism to what may be called the living reality of 
his subjects—their life force instead of their outward aspects. More 
than one commentator on the passing of realism has suggested that 
the immediate next phase might be a pendulum-swing to the region 
of abstract design, but that the real new development will come 
when the searchers for form combine their findings with that inten- 
sity of life, that psychological insight, which only the era of real- 
ism could have developed. If the path of the future lies in that 
direction, Epstein has taken the longest step forward. There are 
critics who call him the greatest living sculptor, and it would be an 
exceptional observer who failed to class him with the three or four 
undoubted geniuses in the field. 

In choosing illustrations of Epstein’s work, I have purposely lim- 
ited the portraits to one: the very sensitive but very broadly mod- 
elled Mask of Mrs. Jacob Epstein. It exhibits the characteristic 


synthesis of apparently archaic and apparently realistic traits—the 


302 


BASS bee Or RS. SE PSE DN’; 
Boye rA CO Be oP Sv bl N 


sculptural form and the psychological content; for the rest, there is 
on page 281 the very simple, very seductive Mother and Child. 
Herewith, in utter contrast, is the recent Christ. This last has pro- 
vided fuel for one of the hottest controversial fires in the history 


of London “art circles.” And well it might in a land where sculp- 


303 


(7H Sele, 
BY JACO Bat ne hern 


ture has traditionally been even politer and more watered than in 
America. Expressionistic it undoubtedly is—that is, careless of 
nature in the search for direct expression; look at the size of the 
hands and the “cut” of the figure. But J am wondering whether 
the critics and the small public who hailed it as one of the assuredly 
immortal works are not confounding intellectual expression with 
eesthetic expression. Much as I admire an architectonic quality in 
it, the way in which it builds sculpturally like a pillar, I feel never- 
theless that it is primarily a work of the intellect, rather than an 
emotional conception. It is a sort of intellectual realism, in which 
the idea diverts from pure esthetic enjoyment. 

The people who call the formal dimension in painting “volume” 
or “voluminous form” would, I suppose, call the extra dimension 
in sculpture “movement.” I have tried to find works which would 
illustrate a connotation of this word quite applicable to the new 
sculpture. It has nothing to do with the much-talked-about “ar- 
rested movement,” the caught aspect or posed revealing attitude, 
of the Impressionists. That is dead movement. It has to do with 
organized masses apparently moving in certain directions in a cer- 
tain relationship. In its most obvious surface form, nearer a two- 
dimensional rhythm, it is illustrated in this wood sculpture by Ernst 
Barlach—which I take to be somehow related to the decorative 
branch of modern painting, to Gauguin and the early Matisse. In 
a more essentially sculptural form it is in the work of Gaudier and 
in the Repose of Archipenko. But it is a thing I despair of point- 
ing out if the reader does not feel it. 

More superficially, movement as a subject is capitalized by 


Duchamp-Villon in the panel shown at the close of the chapter. 


305 


WOMAN, BY DUCHAMP-VILLON 


PANEL, BY ERNST BARLACH 


This same sculptor has the quality more profoundly in the Woman 
shown here. Perhaps it is only the living quality in these things, 
potential movement in the sense of aliveness—but in some vague 
way it does speak to me as movement. I wish to dwell particularly, 
however, on the architectural phase of Duchamp-Villon’s work. He 
did a number of panels designed to be set into walls. One some- 
times wonders what would happen if our architects—who have all 
but killed their art with perfectly tasteful ornament and an unfail- 
ing knowledge of the past—should forget all styles and compose 
again spatially, as if with so many blocks; knock through their 
windows and doors, and then accent the remaining bare wall space 


only in collaboration with an architect-sculptor. Duchamp-Villon 


307 


BAS-RELIEF, BY, ARISTIDE Ciao 


was working that way, having designed buildings with integral ab- 
stract sculpture (not pictorial sculpture-decoration such as one sees 
at the Architectural League exhibitions, and too often, though sel- 
dom, in buildings—painty subjects translated into stone). 

Few sculptors have gone so far as Duchamp-Villon, I think, in at- 
taining to a building technique in sculpture; but the whole modern- 


ist current, being toward solidity, massiveness and repose, has been 
308 


in that direction. There is nothing in Rodin, surely, so finely 
architectural as the panel by Maillol shown here, and later men like 
Metzner and certain of the Dutch and Scandinavian sculptors have 
practically found themselves through their actual composing in 
connection with buildings. Here in America the sculptural “‘adorn- 
ment’ of important structures is a bit of patronage thrown to a 
sculptor by an architect who is himself a Neo-Classicist or an eclec- 
tic or a man trained to the love of the typical Beaux-Arts flourish; 
at least it was that way until a modern architect began to raise his 
head here and there to the Westward. 

The tendency to modelling instead of stone-cutting, leading to 
facility and pictorial illustration, helped to widen the gap between 


sculpture and architecture. By going back over the illustrations of 


Ale oie UO DIY TNO AN Tioe 
BY HUNT DIEDERICH 


309 


these two chapters, and thinking of the originals in relation to 
buildings, you may be able to gauge how far the search of the mod- 
ern sculptors for form has tended to bring them back to an archi- 
tectural feeling of structure. Is it not clear how the repose, the 
solidity, the “stone quality” of the new sculptures fit in with the 
solidity, simplicity and serenity of all great architecture? Perhaps 
there is a new architecture not unworthy of association with this 
sculpture—perhaps an architecture born similarly of the search for 
form, even an architecture fundamentally based like this sculpture 


on volumes in relation. Let us inquire. . . 


PANEL, BY DUCHAMP-VILLOW 


XV 


ARCHITECT, DECORATOR 
AND ENGINEER 


' 
a 
' , 
‘ ae . 
hi) 
: 7 ‘ 
* ; « a ‘ 
* 
a ‘ 
* 
. > 
€ * 
‘ 
4 
s 
* \ * 
. . 7 
> oe 
i % - : 
ry : 
* 
c ¢ . 
* 
se, ‘ 
7 » 
=? 4 “ 
° * 
ree ; 
- 
+ eg 
= 54 
? 
ge 
‘ 
, 
’ * 
>» 
* 


Siete CE BY Sh RICH MENDEL SOHN 


RCHITECTURE, in the nature of its materials and its pur- 
poses, cannot be “representative.” Its lack of originality and 
vitality during the last four hundred years cannot be traced to ex- 
actly the same cause as the lack of creativeness in the graphic arts 
—to servile representation of the outward aspects of nature. But 
a clear parallel exists: Architecture has been servilely imitative 
of the “accepted styles’—imitative of what were authoritatively 
sanctioned as the masterpieces of earlier times. In the period be- 
tween 1500 and 1900, roughly, it came to be a common supposition 
that the possible types of building art had been exhausted. Archi- 
tects were content to work in classic or neo-classic, Greek or Ro- 
man, Gothic or neo-Gothic, Italian or French Renaissance. The 
trail of this false belief is to be seen written in stone across the 
facades not only of the buildings which are themselves the descend- 
ants of structures of ancient or medieval days—churches, palaces, 
triumphal arches—but on the faces of nine-tenths of our business 
skyscrapers, our banks, our public libraries, our railroad terminals. 
These many centuries, architects have been the perfect type of imi- 
tative professional artist: cultured, correct, resourcefully decora- 
tive, tasteful—but they have been likewise unoriginal, tame, con- 
ventional, impotent. 


* 


Fortunately there is also a parallel to the 20th Century insur- 


313 


gency of the post-Impressionist painters and. sculptors, a mod- 
ernist development that has given us the first examples of a new 
creative architecture which goes, on the one land, back to the fun- 
damental principles of zsthetic building, and on the other, forward 
to a reflection of the spirit and uses of today, and to logical employ- 
ment of today’s materials. The architects who have so dared to 
defy convention are even more suspect in their own profession than 
are the modernist painters in theirs, and less known to the public; 
but the foundations they have laid are no less solid and secure, no 
less certain to carry the weight of the architecture of tomorrow. 
Creative architecture practically went out when the designers of 
Gothic buildings turned their attention away from structural and 
organizational problems to refinements of decoration. The Renais- 
sance, as the name implies, found its source in classic architecture, 
although the Florentine Palace type had something strong and ex- 
pressive in it that suggests new blood and original thinking. But 
French Renaissance and English Renaissance are merely imitative 
developments, marked by differing modes of prettifying their mod- 
els, by varying types of refinement in the decorative elements. The 
same old girl, getting pretty seedy looking if one inquired beyond 
the surface, dolled up in changing fashions of clothing! And inas- 
much as French clothes are more showy and have better lines than 
E English or German or Italian, French Renaissance or post-Renais- 
-sance_ ‘architecture has been a world fashion these several genera- 
tions, If the statement seems broad, you might look up pictures of 
the palaces* of Brussels, Moscow, Petrograd, Scandinavia, the Bal- 
kan states, the German capitals, etc., etc., or look at the “show” 


theatres of Europe, from Bucharest to Stockholm and Lisbon, in 


314 


Sie SS Oj tO | By hOB MAL Is tS GEV ENS 


London, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Mexico City, Buenos 
Aires, etc., down to your home-town “opera house.” Nine-tenths 
of them aspiring to be little Paris Opera Houses. Or stand where 
you are and look up at the nearest “architectural monument;”’ the 
New York Public Library, the Grand Central Terminal, the fire- 
house in the middle of your block, or Senator So-and-So’s new 
mansion, or whatever building happens to be the “ornament” to 
your particular town. Well, of course, the statement is too broad; 
we are still building a certain number of Gothic churches, the 
Boston Public Library is solid Italian, not French Renaissance, and 
English Collegiate is having a vogue in college towns 

But French architecture dominates the Western world today—by 
right of putting up the prettiest decorated front, when fronts are 
chiefly what the designer sees in the word “architecture”; and our 
“leading” architects are Beaux-Arts men, trained in a Paris. school 
and saturated with Parisian culture. Thus it comes about that the 
chief epithet of opprobrium in the mouths of the truly. modernist 
builders is ““Beaux Arts’; and France, instead of breeding the first 
rebels as in the graphic arts, lags last in the development of a typi- 


cally modern architecture. The rest of the nations are outdistancing 


315 


> 


France because, having got into the lying habit of putting French 
clothes over their buildings, they are beginning to recognize the 
lying quality of it. They are beginning to see, too, that clothing 
buildings in any pre-existing style is not honest creation; that it is 
necessary for the style, if there must be such a thing, to grow out 
of the living architect, his times, the spirit and the materials of those 
times. 

The architecture of the late 19th Century, and with rare but very 
important exceptions, that of the 20th Century, is sham art not only 
in the sense of thus being falsely dressed-up, but in its structural 
dishonesty. I am thinking particularly of our American business 
buildings now, because they are more usually a shell on a steel 
‘ rame—although hollow columns are by no means unknown to coun- 
try houses and cottages everywhere. A frame of a sort unknown 


_ to earlier centuries is constructed, and on that the architect hangs a 


Ay fagade with decorations that grew out of ancient structural functions 


which’ have no longer any validity. Columns that pretend to carry 
the weight, but are simply set in when the actual organic structure 
has been completed; buttresses that have no side-thrust to resist, 
that are built up uselessly beside the steel-supported wall to make 
a false show of style; deep-cut openings in the stone facing to give 

the “effect” of heavy masonry, where only the lightest shell of stone 
“or brick is structurally needed; Roman or regal French “fronts” 
~ on a railroad terminal that has functions never dreamed of by the 
| ~ Romans or the French courts; cornices hung up uselessly on flat- 
Monten buildings: these are some of the commoner dishonesties of 
our best architects. Our current architectural magazines are still 


full of them; they are taught as “architectural art” in the training 


316 


Poet LON. BUPLDING AT COLOGNE, 
Boye) OS PH. HORM AN N 


schools. For that art consists of the designing of facades, without 
first emphasis on structural truth. At best this current practice and 


teaching show up world architecture, except for a handful of rebels, 


as confessedly uncreative, imitative, eclectic, feeble; at worst, as ._ 
yh > a 


dishonest, hypocritic, willing to steal (tastefully), irresponsible— ~ 


dy 
» > 


and withal conceited over it. | oe eae 
. : 3 28 Fel S @ 
: : : : Toms 
The modern architect who comes at his work creatively brings to | * 


it an honest conception of building as such. Fundamentally, I sup- 
pose, the problem of architecture is to build walls and roof and 


knock the necessary holes for entrance and light. (Look some day 


317 


at the New York Public Library with that truth in mind, to see how 
far the architect has strayed toward considering decorative elements 
instead of this fundamental problem.) Beyond that there is the 
matter of organization of masses—much the same problem of space 
and volume that the sculptor has to treat. If I were teaching a group 
of architectural students, I would start them not on the “orders” 
but on problems of form-composition, organization of cubes or 
blocks, volume relationship, for that is at the heart of their problem’ 
of design. Expressive form in architecture comes out of the 
“reality of use,” if I may so put it—something paralleling that 
structural reality of subject matter which we discussed in connection 
with painting and sculpture; and out of the architect’s emotion over 


his building, his experience of the exciting “feel” of building; and 


~- out of the potentialities of his materials, the opportunity to intensify 


~some quality of the brick or stone or steel or wood that he em- 


ploys. Honesty of conception, truth to purpose, expressive shaping 


- -.. according to some emotional conception, form-seeking within the 


limits of function and material—these are the only suggestions I 
will make here of the esthetic principles underlying modernist 
practice, as against that of the men who deify style, charm and re- 
finement. 

The first real modernists were more engineers than architects. 
They went in for straight, unadorned, undisguised building. They 
created some of the least obnoxious factories we have, and some 
fine monuments like the Brooklyn Bridge, High Bridge and many 
railroad constructions. But there were attempts to come at a mod- 
ern style through decorative elements even before any marked 


structural movement took direction. One of these decorative styles 


318 


Palos lt LON “BUILDING, 
Bieoen wn O TAUT AND jJOSEPH HOFFMANN 


achieved a considerable vogue in Europe, and left its traces in 


> Tt was a terrible thing 


America—under the name “Art Nouveau.’ 
because it sought to cover up structural dishonesty with a sickly 
sort of curved-line ornamental distraction. It was doubtless hailed 
as “modernism” in its day; but it never got below the surface, and 
was rightly laughed out of court. Tasteful imitation, even with the 
hand of death on it, was better than such a forced style. 

A later decorative approach was fruitful of at least sensuously 
pleasing results, however. It culminated in what I can only call 


“Viennese Secession” architecture. It has a certain validity be- 


319 


cause it demands a return to simple lines and flat spaces before it 
begins to decorate; and its ornament is the loveliest, most seduc- 
tive sort ever invented by a sophisticated civilization. Its masters 
are the Viennese architects, Hoffmann, Witzmann, Strnad and their 
fellows, and Joseph Urban has transported their style—so far as 
interiors go—to New York with its appeal intact. We also see the 
fruiting of it, with a slight French flavor, in the Cammeyer Build- 
ing on Fifth Avenue. But Hoffmann remains the chief, as he was 
one of the first masters. His box-like arrangements, from which 
he has cut off all traditional ornament, but with the edges decorated 
in typical Viennese fashion, with “‘just the touch,” marked some- 
thing new in exteriors; and the interiors, panelled with a perfect 
sense of decorative proportioning and hung with all-over patterns 


of ravishing color and design, have set the fashion recently for in- 


terior decorators in all the Greenwich Villages the world over. A 


fine advance it is, too, in this time when dullness had become a vir- 


tue, color a crime, and methodism the standard of respectability. 


In addition to an example of Hoffmann’s work, I am adding a re- 


production of a design by Rob Mallet-Stevens, who has done (on 
paper) the prettiest and catchiest things that have come out of 
France in this posteresque Secession mode. But as I have said in 
an earlier chapter, a primarily sensuous surface art, appealing as it 
may be, and grateful as we are for it as compared with the dull dig- 
nified thing, does not hold the soul of great creative art. It is too 
largely decoration for its own sake—there is something deeper. 
The really great new architecture grows primarily out of the new 
problems of an industrial civilization, out of housing its business 


and out of housing its workers and its capitalist-aristocracy—and 
320 


this new architecture can hardly be said to have found its decora- 
tive mode. The skyscraper is the typical building of this time; 
typical of the fine energy, courage, ultimate though hardly realized 
aspiration; but typical, too, of the ruthlessness, the selfish exploi- 
tation, the financial tyranny. One would think that the architects 
would have detected immediately the basic esthetic premise here, 
would have grasped the possibility of capitalizing height, the sky 
pierced, scores of stories built up, up, thousands of windows, per- 
fected steel articulation that permitted the building to tower. But 
they have failed almost continuously, all but wasted the opportu- 
nity that is America. They uninventively stuck to their traditional, 


schoolbook methods. They built disguising masks over the tower- 


t 
Pye 


te | v0 0 WOH WD Wy 
0 % 4 (i) a vr“ it 
0  adadntie 
*f YY a %y PATA? 
NW. oy 
NOM 0 4 : Oop MN ( 
i, Oy 
4 Nh, Hf ey NW 
a ; | Ay 
Rel i, 
QV i | 


fey 
ra 


| 
is 
| 


' 
4 


DESETGN FOR A GARAGE, BY ROB MALLET-STEVENS 


321 


ing steel skeletons. They tried to make the skyscraper look what it 
was not—a low, reposeful, Greekish structure. They succeeded 
usually in making it look like several poor academic buildings piled 
on each other—characteristic that was, too, of the cultural confu- 
sion they felt when faced with this new problem. Particularly they 
are guilty almost everywhere of breaking the logical upright lines 
by repeated horizontal lines, courses, colonnades, entablatures, cor- 
nices, whatnots. They knew horizontal designing and thought to 
compress the skyscraper into it. 

Came the engineer, and had no more caution than to confess the 
skeleton underneath, let the height be seen unashamed. And then 
the architect-engineer, the man who sees building before decora- 
tion, the structure and the mass before the facade, the imaginative- 
emotional lover of the art of building. Most significantly he was 
Louis Sullivan, the great American pioneer builder-artist. Even a 
quarter-century ago he was outrageously revolutionary: he asked 
architects to be honest, to substitute service and love for “show,” 
to learn architecture from the ground up rather than from ornament 
part way down, to cut through the falsities of convention to the 
foundations of the esthetics of building and of our American civi- 
lization. To be sure, he castigated the “cultured” architects un- 
mercifully, showed up in no uncertain terms the lying, egotistic 
quality of their work—and happily finds occasion still to fire a 
broadside at the diminishing majority. For his fight is almost won. 
In the last five years the skyscraper has oftener and oftener con- 
fessed that it is a honeycomb tower of steel, with a protecting en- 
casement of stone, brick or tiling; the decorative features have 
measurably grown out of its soaring lines, out of its steel skeleton, 


322 


HEREC Owe 
RESRLE TSS 
S2ESeS ee 


bdind 
st 
RR 
a 
ee 
ae 
ee 
By 


Copgright by Underwood and U iiversused 
DOWNTOWN NEW YORK 


its immense expanse of glass and the subordinate encasing remain- 
der of walls. Already we have enough of these finely expressive 
buildings to know that a really modern type of architecture has been 
found. And taken collectively, the downtown section of an Ameri- 
can city is likely to stir one’s deepest emotional feelings, to thrill 
all but the timid-minded with a thrill that can only be regarded as 
esthetic. 

In America Sullivan was the pioneer, and we shall meet some of 
his pupils in a moment in other connections. * But the men who are 


profiting by the principles he first pointed out are so many, without 


323 


BUSH TERMINAL SALES BUTTOING, 
BY HELMLE AND CORDS 


324 


any great figure standing out, that we may leave the skyscraper mat- 
ter without further mention of names—except Helmle and Corbett, 
because I am putting in an illustration of their Bush Terminal 
Sales Building in New York, one of the most satisfying business- 
towers structurally. In Europe, although the skyscraper has 
gained no such place or fame, there has been a similar movement 
toward recognition of honest structural principles in the design of 
business buildings, toward recognition of the essential values of 
varying materials, and away from the old obsession with imitative 
styles and “finish.”” The name most revered by the modernists is 
that of A. P. Berlage, and it is to him most of all that the Hol- 
landers owe the vitality of their progressivism in architecture. No 
other country in Europe has quite so live a group of “radicals’”— 
men like de Klerk, Wijdeveld and Kramer—and they have notice- 
ably affected the aspect of the country’s architecture. 

Germany too had come to a finely solid, clean-cut sort of busi- 
ness structure even before the war—there has been precious little 
building since, but there has been a welter of imaginative and crea- 
tive experiment on paper—and even the sketchiest list of leaders 
must include Peter Behrens, Max Littmann, Alfred Messe] and J. 
M. Olbrich, and in Austria Otto Wagner. These are the names one 
meets oftenest in collecting the material that would seem to count in 
connection with the early days of “the new movement.” But these 
men, as radical as Sullivan and Berlage, are now the mild revolu- 
tionaries in Central Europe. It is rather Bruno Taut and Erich 
Mendelsohn and the Luckhardt brothers who are the storm center 
today. They are the truly Expressionistic architects, and they carry 


the ideas of distortion, intensification and free emotionalism over 


325 


MODEL FOR MAGDEBURG MUNICIPAL BUILOTA Gs. 
BY) Bi RA NiO pele eo 


into building design in a way that scandalizes those who see certain 
logical rigidities and straightnesses in the very nature of building 
materials. Perhaps they are extreme—one never hopes to meet 
some of their designs in the concrete on land or sea—but out of 
their extraordinary imaginativeness, their freedom of feeling, there 
is coming a new spirit of emotional approach to the problems of 
building, a new sense of the importance of a fascinating architec- 
tonic form-problem with millions of unrealized potentialities for 
plastic beauty. These are, perhaps, the forerunners of something 
to come after the skyscraper-honesty period. 

To return to the comparatively sane American field, we come to 
the man who is considered by many of the European progressives to 
be the greatest living architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. He has been 


less concerned with the skyscraper or business building problem 


326 


>*, 


4 


SASS 
t 


PLP LLP 


I EG LP LP LD LF PF 


| 


al 
— 


sive CRA RE R DES TGN:, 
BY “HANS SOEDER 


than with residential architecture, wherein he has created something 
so near to a style that one can go into any American suburb and 
pick the houses done by his imitators or their imitators; and in cer- 
tain sections of Europe what is known as “the American style”’ is 
straight Wright. (There are books about him in Europe, but none 
in America.) His mode of building is marked—or was, because he 
is after something else just now—by total absence of traditional 
ornament or illogical methods of design, by creative organization 
of the main masses, accentuation of these masses by emphasized 
roof lines, constant play of texture interest in his materials, and a 
general sense of horizontal repose, fitness to the surrounding scene 
and “‘color” in the broader sense. Sometimes in his houses, and al- 
most extravagantly in a conception like his Midway Gardens, an 


open air “resort” in Chicago, he runs to an individual decorative 


327 


motive based on flat geometric forms—an abstract sculptural com- 
posing in wooden beams, crossbars and projections. Lately Wright 
has made designs for the Barnsdall Theatre in Los Angeles which 
mark a new “phase” in his development, a remarkably direct 
method of composing in “cubes” with accents of ornament that 
give an almost jeweled effect. And at the other extreme he did the 
often-reproduced office building of the Larkin Factory in Buffalo, 
a structure that is based on his conception of the typical factory 
quality and factory needs, and that foreran the logical “pier-and- 
grill” type of construction which appears more and more frequently 
in business buildings. 

It is not necessary to go deeply into this matter of factory build- 
ing, beyond the suggestion that many people who had tired of con- 
ventional hypocrisy in architecture, long ago began to appreciate 
the sheer brick-and-glass buildings done by industrial engineers 
more than the “ornamental” buildings like libraries, city halls and 
art galleries. Many of those earlier structures had a feel of integ- 
rity and fitness about them that came as a grateful relief. And 
lately men like Behrens in Germany, Luthman in Holland, and even 
some of our originally academic architects like Cass Gilbert and 
Holabird and Roche in America, have been taking this sheer fac- 
tory quality and capitalizing it into something powerfully expressive 
and even esthetically moving. Most notably, perhaps, Erich Men- 
delsohn has made a remarkable series of Expressionistic designs 
for various industrial uses, each one reflecting the spirit of the in- 
dustry and the architect’s individual emotion over it, and having 
obvious form-values in the compositional organization. 


England has brought little to the modern architecture movement 


328 


scene ne 4 


fener tee PAGTORY, BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 


except in the field of domestic architecture. By reviving the admi- 
rable “cottage” type, wherein simple mass composition was handled 
with instinctive creativeness, that country put forward the impetus 
toward honest and expressive home design in most of the Western 
world. E. L. Lutyens and M. H. Baillie Scott picked up this essen- 
tially English tradition and developed it with a truly creative indi- 
viduality. A similar but less widespread creative revival has taken 
place in New Mexico and California, where the notably beautiful 
remains of Indian-Spanish architecture have been the starting-point 


for the most virile development of stylistic expression in this 
329 


HOUSE; BY FRANK LLOYD Wasa 


country since Colonial architecture came to its decadence. (Please, 
dear reader, don’t confuse this with what we used to call on the 
Coast “the Mission Style.”) I am reminded that California has 
had more than its share of modern architecture, in that beside 
these creative adaptationists, the very original and important Ber- 
nard Maybeck works there, putting up unostentatiously his resi- 
dences rich in color, always with a formal value that is at once an 
expression of the architect’s emotion and his reading of the char- 
acter of his client—and of the site and materials. 

Of another kind of residence, the apartment house, typically of 


today, of the teeming city, of our crowded intense life, there are 


330 


too few notable examples in truly creative vein. But that is coming 
too, honestly, with the recognition of the essential esthetic merits of 
skyscraper construction, and the growing sensitiveness of our archi- 
iects to fitness of decorative elements to use. Already we begin to 
see these human beehives blossoming out frankly as what they are, 
_and not as imitation palaces or overgrown Colonial manor houses 
or Gothic retreats. Of all countries Holland has been most success- 
ful in the application of modern logic to the apartment problem. 
We seem to be merely groping still for expressiveness of any 
modern spirit in our churches: the structures by Ralph Adams 
Cram and Bertram Goodhue in strict traditional style are still our 
most appealing houses of worship—although almost any old mod- 
ernist contraption may be judged better than “average’’ Gothic. 
Nor have we got away from the mausoleum style of art museum. 
Our theatres still ape hollowly the magnificence of Paris, with a 
few encouraging but hardly exciting exceptions. The colleges fall 
back for the most part on Neo-classic, Renaissance, Colonial, or 
that special phase called English Collegiate. Which leads me to 
make the reservation that creative adaptation, by a man who is 
honest-minded about it, is likely to prove next best thing to a 


really creative and successful modernist achievement, and far 


DESIGN FOR AN AERODROME, 
BY ERICH MENDELSOHN 


Se Mia ee. 


seo 


“Cobyragis by Underwood and Unllereoad 


WOOLWORTH BULEDING, BY CASS 3Giperat 


better than the average work of the would-be progressives. I am 
thinking about the Harkness Quadrangle at Yale, designed by John 
Gamble Rogers. I confess that I have gone up to New Haven three 
times just to wander around in it, and there isn’t anything really 
new except the texture interest, the scientific use of broken color, 
and perhaps a general spirit of loving craftsmanship. But there 
is emotion in the place, despite its frank copying of forms out of 
the past. Perhaps here the somewhat servile copying of the general 
forms of fine buildings of other days is combined with enough of 
the surface characteristics of creative modernism to make the whole 
seem living. Conversely I see in the famous Woolworth Building 
of Cass Gilbert an example of creative massing, creative design 
for modern needs, typical skyscraper soaring; but over it a coating 
of servilely imitative historic ornament—which still is not potent 
to destroy the emotion the structural element evokes in me. Both 
these are compromised creations—but there is honesty and love 
enough in them to make them stir us to admiration and enjoyment. 

Remember, dear reader, that honesty in one way or another is 
the first key to the situation, both in creation and in appreciation. 
If a building be not what it pretends to be, it is not a work of 
modern art. But you will find the honest buildings multiplying 
fast, and buildings with the quality of form-creation speaking to 
your spirit from them. If you cannot be stirred by them, you are 
not likely ever to come to anything but hypocritical enjoyment of 
modern painting or sculpture. Someone wise has said that a man 
who has not learned to discriminate between, the true and the false 
in the “arts of use” will never come to an appreciation of what is 


noble in the “‘fine arts.” In a primer, where I am supposed to 


333 


begin with the fundamentals, I should perhaps have put this 
chapter first. Still, it would have turned away a lot of readers. 
The time is coming, however, when architecture will be acknowl- 
edged again as a leader among the arts. Don’t be fooled by the 
Greek fronts and Beaux-Arts flourish. Look the other way and 


you may surprise beauty naked and unashamed. 


> REG 
BY WENZEL HABLISE 


be? 


XVI 


THE CHANGING THEATRE 


\- 


HE art of the theatre is stirred by the same forces of rebellion 

and renewed life that I have tried to trace in painting, sculp- 

ture and architecture. No other art, to be sure, is so wrapped up 
in confusion, contradiction and vain shoutings regarding its mod- 
ernism; but that is only an outcome of the multiple nature of the 
stage, play and actor as an art medium, and the exceptional difh- 
culty of bringing to final material consummation in a theatre any 
strikingly new conception. We have had, indeed, precious few 
examples of complete, rounded-out modernist productions in which 
the spirit of post-Impressionistic art characterized play, acting and 
mounting: the progress has been so piecemeal, indeed, that I find 
myself faced with the necessity of tracing the movement succes- 
sively and separately through the experiments of theorists, play- 
wrights and “decorators.” For that very reason I wish to begin 
by affirming that the larger theatre can move forward only by 
developing a new drama, a new stage, a fresh standard of acting 
and a new stagecraft concurrently. Developing a remarkably able 
group of clear-thinking scenic artists is not enough; nor is it enough 
to call in the ablest artists out of painting, literature, dancing, etc. 
For there are expressive forms that pertain particularly and 
peculiarly to the theatre, and the artist can capture them only 
through a thorough consideration and love of the complete theatre 
as such. They are not likely to be discovered by casual invaders 


who think in terms either of Expressionistic painting or of free 


337 


verse, or of theories of gesture-and-music or esthetic dancing or 
stylized acting. The stage, while partaking of the materials and 
of the nature of these other arts, has its own form in a synthesis of 
their collective values and something more. ‘The true artist of 
the theatre will create from visions of the theatre as a whole—stage 
and auditorium, movement and sound, light, color, poetry, human- 
ity, acting, soul related to soul. 

Negatively, the movement has closely paralleled the anti-realistic 
current in the graphic arts. There has been, indeed, a well-defined 
struggle to free the stage from the centuries-old obsession with 
representation and imitation, to free it for creative expressiveness; 
to find ways of escape from the sphere of sentiment, anecdote, plot- 
weaving and photography, into a sphere where beauty of form 
might be locked with the release of the spirit. It is but natural, 
however, that a composite art which has become also a great busi- 
ness, with vast numbers of non-artists dependent upon it for their 
living, should resist change even more bitterly than the compara- 
tively “removed” arts of painting and sculpture. The greater 
number of playwrights, actors, designers and other workers for 
the current theatre, having dedicated their lives to making a certain 
sort of drama live, naturally defend it against the attack of the 
modernists with all their weapons. They are even better entrenched 
than the academic painters: they are in possession of the very 
expensive machinery of the art. 

Looking at the question with the larger perspective of a study of 
the theatre’s entire history, however, one is tempted to ask: why 
should realism be expected to live? Recognizing that drama began 


as religious ritual, grew to noble group-entertainment in art and 


338 


ritual fused, had very distinctive theatrical “form,” and then 
decayed in spectacle and realistic mimicry; was reborn at the 
church altar, became the people’s outlet for their spiritual and 
play life, then flowered in poetic-theatric expression, only to fall 
away into a weak purveyor to the people’s desire for sentiment, 
romance and sophisticated story-telling; and finally narrowed itself 
down to objective picturing of observed or imagined existence, and 
so to the curiosity-satisfying analytic-photographic play and the 
peep-hole stage of today, concerned with the surprises and taboos 
of individual living—the whole a record extending from the gods 
through imagination and romance to contemporary life, with innu- 
merable branchings, decayings, rebirths; recognizing this as the 
constantly changing history of the theatre, why, in heaven’s name, 
should anyone think that the realistic-romantic drama is a final 
form? Not only is there nothing to indicate that any form can 
ever be considered final, but everything points to realism as the 
decadent thing, as the drama farthest removed from the spirit, as 
the expression of ages that have become material, self-conscious, 
devitalized. Moreover, realism with us today has already come 
to the impasse created by its own perfecting. It finds at last that 
it has encompassed, not the emotion of mankind, the spirit of a 
people, or formal beauty, but a perfected machine, a super-camera 
—able to give back a selective but always photographic reflection 
of life. 

I am not fooling myself into thinking that any little pack of 
rebels can drive realism from the theatres in any given quarter- 
century, or even that the gradual trend to a new type of production 


will make any perceptible difference in the number of realistic 


339 


plays to be produced on New York’s Broadway next season. There 
will be more counterparts of The Easiest Way, Rain, Loyalties and 
The Circle, even more Shaw, which is really a step upward; more 
stunts like the transplanted Childs Restaurant, and the elevator’s 
squeak, and the real cabbages, and endless faithful Period interiors, 
leading-hotel interiors and Harlem interiors; more natural acting, 
down to the last vulgarity, perfectly faithful to a studied original 
and perfectly uninspired. There are plenty of times when I think 
it is right that we should have these things, as we have The Saturday 
Evening Post, baseball and the movies, for our wholesome amuse- 
ment and shallow comfort (although the movies might be asked to 
tinker up their wholesomeness a bit). For most of us they are 
necessary, to take the place of religion and culture. In the absence 
of anything to be called a modern church, in the absence of any 
adequate amount of art related to contemporary life, these are at 
present our relaxation, our relief from the grind of making a living, 
our substitute of entertainment for spiritual life. But need we 
insist that they have to do with art? 

I suppose that one cannot claim a constructive modernist develop- 
ment for the theatre without pointing out the parallel to the expres- 
sive form quality in painting and architecture. I confess that I am 
even more at a loss for words to suggest what I feel theatric form 
to be, than I was in the case of the graphic arts back in the chapter 
on Theoretical Background. Although this is my own art, for I am 
a worker in the theatre, the essential thing we are after, the essential 
drama quality, the revelation of spirit that is beyond plot, charac- 
ter, action and ensemble, seems more elusive than the correspond- 


ing quality in the other art fields. I have responded to it in divers 


340 


places: at the culminating emotional moment of a typical story- 
play, in a cramped Broadway playhouse; in the open air when 
Margaret Anglin played something of Sophocles in the Greek 
Theatre at Berkeley; without understanding more than a rare word 
of the language, when I saw the driving, Expressionistic Masse- 
Mensch production at the Volksbiihne in Berlin; at rehearsals, at 
a simple production of Hamlet, most recently at moments in the 
performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author. What 
I mean is that at these times there got over to me, a spectator look: 
ing at action on a stage, a spirit out of the production; a nioving, 
compelling, dynamic thing that stilled my mind, emotionalized ny 
whole being, wrapped me up in ecstasy, that made me belong com: 
pletely and joyously to the theatre, a sheer dramatic emotion. : 

Where theatre productions at other times are merely amusement, 
or entertainments that play pleasant tricks with our surface emo: 
tions, these rare productions are profoundly stirring, and they leave 
one looking back pleasurably, with the thought that there all the 
resources of the stage were combined in one essentially theatric 
emotion; that the theatre has been used with profound expressive- 
ness—and in that lies the revelation of theatric form. 

The easiest types of drama to identify as “new” are those that 
are primarily sensuous in appeal—the wordless productions, 
swinging away from literature toward music and color, that are 
sometimes set off in a special category called “esthetic drama.” 
The best known, and perhaps most successful, examples have been 
created in some of the “dance-dramas” of Diaghileff’s Russian 
Ballet. Aside from the conjunction with music and dependence 


upon emotional as against imitative use of line and color in the 


341 


MOVEMENT—FROM AN ETCHING BY GORDON CRAIG 


backgrounds, there is here the central emphasis on movement 
instead of story—and movement is (thanks very largely to our 
American Isadora Duncan) in the best modern dancing wholly 
abstract and expressive. 

It would seem at first glance that these Russians, helped some- 
times by foremost French painters like Derain and Picasso, have 
achieved the answer to the question about theatric form. — For theirs 
is a typically and frankly theatric art, inclining toward abstract 
means, presentative of emotion and rhythm rather than imitative 
of outward aspects of life, carrying the spectator with certainty 
into an ecstasy of the senses. And yet, when all is said and done, 
this very fascinating thing seems to me to lack something of the 
finest nobility and expressiveness of which the theatre is capable. 
It tends too far toward the essential qualities of music and dancing 
as such; there is some finer and wider implication in the word 
“drama” which it has missed. It is magnificent; but like most 
magnificent buildings or paintings or sculptures, it is likely to be 
just a little empty—spiritually. In the joy it gives us sensuously, 
and in its failure to go deeper, it is perhaps the theatre’s counter- 
part of decorative painting, the stage version of Gauguin’s canvases. 
It is, to be sure, the completest thing developed in all the phases of 
theatric modernism. But the sensuous theatre is not all the theatre, 
and its half of the modernist stage movement is likely to prove a 
minor half. The theatre using words as one of its media seems to 
hold the larger promise of spiritual and formal beauty. 

There is great danger, of course, that the theatre will swing too 
far in the other direction, toward literary values, when the drama- 


tist attempts new creative things away from the primarily sensuous 


343 


field. For many centuries the greater portion of what is called 
drama has been predominantly literary, and recently it has been 
almost exclusively of the shallow fiction type, without the slightest 
formal beauty—journalistic, literal, unimaginative. One may see 
that danger, and still believe that drama is as closely related 
eesthetically to literature as it is to music, dancing or the color arts. 
For I think there is no way of evading the fact that in dramatic pro- 
duction in its most moving forms, story-development or character- 
development is a major factor. This need not be plot for its own 
sake, as the short-story writers use it. It may be the play of divinity 
shaping a sequence of events, soul brought to soul before our eyes, 
a reflection in unfolding action of the universal relating rhythm. 
It may be hardly more than a loose arrangement of improvisations 
on a certain theme, or it may move as swiftly and inevitably as a 
Greek tragedy; but the flow, the disposition of events, the unroll- 
ing, is of its essential character. We are dealing here with a time 
art, and it is precisely because words are the most expeditious aid 
to unfolding the relationships of humanity, because they hasten 
and intensify the emotional action, that they become a legitimate 
dramatic means. | 
In summary, the following elements probably enter into the 
theatre production’s effectiveness in reaching the emotions of 
the spectator; some sort of crescendo or varied form of action 
or story, words used tonally as well as literally, re-enforcement of 
the emotion by designed lighting, background, color and move- 
ment, and acting that is less personal than character-revealing—and 
beyond these, or perhaps implicit in the synthesis of them, some 


all-over theatrical attribute in the nature of a flowing rhythm. 


s 


344 


About three jumps back in theatre history, such minor revolu- 
tions as there were, clearly were based on changes in the literary or 
playwriting element. The “romantic revival’ was of that sort. 
The following phase, the naturalism of the late 19th Century, was 
likewise more clearly marked in its changing form of play and 
dialogue than in any other element of theatre art; although it 
brought about negative changes in acting and scenic background, 
purging away bombastic-romantic traditions in playing without 
substituting anything but an ineffective naturalism, and destroying 
the more negligently artificial elements in decoration in favor of the 
equally hollow distractions of photographic imitation. In play- 
writing there were always countercurrents to naturalism; romantic 
plays as recently as Rostand; symbolic-mystic plays as recently as 
Maeterlinck; and most important, amounting to a minor revolution 
in itself, the brilliant intellectual drama of Wilde, Shaw and 
Barker. No one need sneer at this English school of playwriting 
just because it failed to achieve formal beauty, and because it nar- 
rowed the theatre down to a playground for intellectuals. At that 
it was infinitely superior to nine-tenths of what passed as theatre 
art out of the preceding two or three centuries. At least it was 
intelligent jugglery of ideas, and that is a step ahead of cheap 
juggling with people’s surface emotions, or sentimental-scientific 
slicing-of-life. 

In the theatre there is a special development of realism which 
perhaps has more to recommend it than the usual realistic painting 
or sculpture. It almost warrants the name “‘spiritualized realism.” 
It moves the spectator in something more than a surface way—but 


it never has that sweep, that dynamic power, that all-enveloping 


345 


beauty which is embraced in some other types of play. It has 
found its richest interpretation in the productions of the Moscow 
Art Theatre under Constantin Stanislavsky, with a group of actors 
who touch the culminating point in repressed naturalistic acting. 
Perhaps because these Russians had refined realism down to the 
last point, the first notable rebellion against naturalistic play- 
writing, in favor of a more typically theatric form, came in Russia, 
in the experiments of Meyerhold and Yevreynoff. Neither one of 
these men has given us important plays upon which to build a new 
type of production. But both contributed to the idea which chiefly 
underlies later experiment. It is that dramatist and audience must 
both accept the fact that the theatre is always a theatre, for shows, 
with an emotional entity of its own, and that to reduce it to a place 
where playwrights and actors try to afford the illusion of real life, 
by imitating nature, is a perversion of its function. In that state- 
ment is the heart of modern dramatic theory. Meyerhold and 
Yevreynoff reverted to naked stages, cleared of the accumulation 
of painted settings and machinery for clever “effects” which the 
three-hundred-year reign of the realistic-pictorial drama had 
accumulated; this stripped stage was brought forward as a frankly 
theatrical element, in order that the actors might be brought forward 
too and appear frankly as actors—all to the end of re-establishing 
the long-lost relationship between players and audience that existed 
in Greek, Medieval and Elizabethan times. No more looking 
through a square frame and pretending that it was the removed 
fourth wall of a room of actual life; no more meticulous repre- 
sentation of nature in the background; no more straining for 


illusion. Dramatists must refuse longer to be bound by the sup- 


346 


posed necessity of holding their characters and action within the 
limits of what might probably and naturally happen in the world 
as we usually know it; they must feel free to violate any three-act 
or five-act formula, or any technical limitation of three settings or 
five or twenty; they must understand only that it is man’s soul and 
emotions and the materials of the theatre that they deal with, 
and that so long as they project these theatrically, in an unfolding 


“show,” 


it makes no difference whether they violate the appear- 
ances of reality, the limits of the realistic peep-hole stage, or the 
rules of current playwriting practice. The grasping of the essen- 
tially theatric thing is what counts. 

Perhaps the original experimenters with this revolutionary, anti- 
realistic idea worked too doctrinairely, perhaps they simply were 
not born to be world-masters in their art, or perhaps the chaotic 
conditions in war-time Russia and post-war Russia have halted their 
development—but certainly they have been eclipsed, temporarily 
or permanently, by the so-called Expressionistic playwrights. This 
group came into world prominence out of Germany in 1920 or 
1921, and today their influence has been felt directly by consider- 
able groups of theatre workers wherever revolutionary ideas are 
welcomed. The Expressionist drama lives up to the suggested 
parallel with Expressionist painting. It grew out of the same im- 
patience with the nature-serving direction of current art practice, 
and out of the widespread groping for new expressive forms. It is 
characterized by the same distortion of the outward aspects of 
nature, the same disregard for technical formulas and niceties, a 
similar headlong, emotional approach. The best-known example 


of the type is Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, because it 


347 


was first translated into English and was later produced in New 
York (and very briefly in London); and Ernst Toller’s Masse- 
Mensch has become a classic example because of its sensational 
qualities and its long run in Berlin. In New York the presentation 
of three native Expressionistic plays on Broadway in quick succes- 
sion, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, John Howard Lawson’s 
Roger Bloomer and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, served to 
familiarize the theatre-going public there with at least the surface 
characteristics of the method. These five examples have this in 
common: they are all constructed—thrown together, some people 
would say—in many short scenes, leaping from crisis to crisis as 
fast as words and action can carry them, without regard to that 
intricate formula of preparation, minor climax and third-act climax 
which has been the respectable superstition of playwriting ever 
since professors first began to dissect the classic dramatists; they 
distort ruthlessly the outward aspects of nature, telescoping time, 
intensifying the emotional “look’”’ of a place to the exclusion of all 
material detail, caricaturing people; they use words with a new 
effectiveness, singly, for immediate emotional reaction, without 
regard to grammatical arrangement—and at the other extreme 
they pile up words and speeches into avalanches of emotion; 
and they all are swift, dynamic, abrupt, Whitmanesque. They 
burst the bounds, too, of the old philosophies and the old divisions 
of realism, romanticism and symbolism, piling these things in too, 
if the mixing helps. They are able to compass such a range and to 
span such chasms because with their first gesture they free them- 
selves of the realistic-naturalistic limitation; because they serve 


notice at the start that actuality doesn’t interest them, and then can 


348 


plunge along from emotional crisis to emotional crisis without stop- 
ping to compromise with plausibility or to make the action seem 
“natural,” 

Many of the incidents in From Morn to Midnight are utterly 
implausible, the Fifth Avenue scene in The Hairy Ape is, on second 
thought, laughably artificial, the caricatures of the capitalists in 
Masse-Mensch are outrageously overdrawn; and yet these extremes 
and abrupt contrasts move us as they are meant to do, and the whole 
piled-up conglomeration stirs us immensely—so that in the end we 
are left with a sense of having been lifted to a new height above 
mankind, of an experience beyond life. Perhaps we are a bit dizzy 
at first, but when that wears off, the sense of wonder, even exalta- 
tion, remains. 

I do not think we have a genuine masterpiece in the type yet—no 
Cezanne or Picasso or Kokoschka of the theatre—but from the pro- 
duction of Masse-Mensch particularly I caught gleams of something 
to come which seems to me most likely to crystallize as our modern- 
ist type of production. I see artists building on the intensity, the 
raw emotion of these plays, a new, virile sort of theatre production, 
as powerful as modern life, stirring, touching beauty at its most 
gorgeous and careless moments. It will never try to evade the con- 
fession of the stage as stage, it will leap into action at the first 
bound, compressing the drama of a lifetime into every episode, 
every moment, packing every speech with a torrent of ideas, laying 
bare life in the raw; it will not always be smooth and intelligible, 
and certainly not pretty; but it will act on you like emotional 
sledge-hammers, it will unaccountably move you and purge your 


soul like the old Greek dramas (curiously enough, considering our 


349 


refined and reverent attitude toward classic plays!) and shock you 
and stir your finest emotions, and outrage your sense of the con- 
ventions of polite drama and polite living, but reveal a deeper 
rhythm, and finally leave you with a feeling of spiritual exaltation. 
Perhaps the abruptness and shock and noisiness will wear down, so 
that the intensity and emotional directness and absolute theatrical- 
ness will remain, to be mated with those universal qualities of 
serenity, profoundness and unity which underlie the greatest art. 
There will always be great acting if there is great drama in the 
world. I am convinced that if we have lacked giants among our 
players in recent generations, it has been because no plays were 
being produced that called for giants. The acting profession is 
“down”’ at the moment, because playwriting has been weak, imita- 
tive, unimaginative, even dull. It made no demands beyond clever 
imitativeness. But here in America we have a remarkable group 
of young actors, intelligent, forward-looking, emotionally alive, 
intense with the feel of the times and love of the stage—and most 
of them are marking time artistically while the “producers” feed 
them on the pap of decadent realism, dramatized best-seller fiction 
and sugared classics. There may be modernist acting as distin- 
guished from what we generally have; if so, it is merely a return 
to real acting, to impersonation, where we have been content with 
the showing up of personal charm and clever mimicking. When 
we get the right combination of play and producer, the acting end 
will be adequately taken care of. What we need is dramatist- 
producers who can visualize acting as they write. I am reminded 
again of the unfortunate separation of functions in the theatre as 


I turn away from both the dramatists and the actors to the stage 


350 


Moet OR ““DANTE,** BY NORMAN BEL-GEDDES 


decorators, with whom lies the rest of the story of modernism on 
the stage. 

Some people still count David Belasco’s revolt against the 
artificiality of staging in the nineties as the beginning of modern 
producing in America. But his was only a much-needed, but ulti- 
mately unimportant, revolution within the field of naturalism. He 
made naturalism solid, of a built rather than a painty sort, but 
meticulously imitative. After him came the true revolution in stage 
setting, the decorator who understood something of unity and syn- 
thesis, who started first by trying to take the stage away from the 
playwrights and actors to make it a painter’s plaything, but who 


soon settled down to fill his niche more efficiently than any other 


351 


MODEL FOR ‘‘DANTE,’’?’ BY. NORMAN BEL =CERDD ee 


worker in the theatre is filling his; a generation which understands 
that the only excuse for the decorator on the stage is to help present 
a play to an audience adequately, appropriately, emotionally, with 
the visual appeal re-enforcing at every point the appeal of the 
spoken word and the individual gesture. | 
The visual appeal is important—co-important with the several 
sorts of appeal that go to make up theatric expressiveness. It is 
here that we come to Gordon Craig, the great pioneer figure in the 
changing world theatre. He stands behind these decorators, behind 
the Russians, and particularly as the great source of inspiration 
and ideas behind the many German modernistic playhouses. His 


influence is felt wherever the new generation is trying new sorts of 


352 


production. Back in the time when Craig was a young actor, stage 
decoration and the visual element in staging were at the lowest ebb. 
Theatre art was made up of play texts, acting and something that 
was ordered in from scenic studios. These studios “supplied the 
art’ in accordance with a run-down tradition, in diluted imitation 
of the grand manner of a century or two earlier, without the faintest 
notion of harmony of play and setting, of unity of impression, of 
creative use of line, mass and color. The visual appeal in the 
theatre was taken care of as an afterthought. 

Gordon Craig rediscovered that the theatre is by exact definition 
first of all “a place for seeing’; he has reaffirmed on a thousand 
occasions the fundamental importance of what can be understood 
by the spectator through the eye—“‘the art of the theatre has sprung 
from action—movement—dance”’; and in emphasizing—perhaps 
over-emphasizing—the importance of the visual element, he once 
added a memorable note: “. . . not a word about it being a place 
for hearing 30,000 words babbled out in two hours.” It is gener- 
ally agreed that this rediscovery of Craig’s marks a turning-point 
in the history of the modern theatre. Only by a complete under- 
standing of the multiple nature of theatre art, and its dependence 
upon movement and visual design as an integral part of its “form,” 
co-ordinate with the appeal to or through the ear, can one get an 
inkling of the visions that the younger theatre artists have seen. 
Craig has never proved a great deal by his productions—they have 
been too few and usually not done freely, independently—but 
through his provocative writings and his extraordinary designs he 
has fired the imaginations of theatre workers, from the commer- 


cially astute Max Reinhardt to the very “special” Copeau, from 


3953 


the Germans who have put his ideas to constructive work in their 
greatest theatres to the experimenters in our hundred amateur 
“little theatres.”” He was anti-realistic from the start; he implied 
if he did not directly point out the necessity for a return to the 
naked stage, the frankly theatrical theatre; he insisted upon a 
“noble artificiality” as a goal, and he experimented with such “pre- 
sentative’ media as the marionette and the mask—a step toward 
abstraction; but most of all, he paved the way for the more radical 
experimenters of today by showing up the lack of unity, the lack of 
vision, the lack of that synthesis of forces which alone can bring 
to flower the thing we have called typical theatric form. If he over- 
stated the importance of the visual element, thus driving minor 
artists to the sin of over-decoration, in the larger view he restored 
a balance which the theatre had to have before modern progress was 
possible. One must mention also Adolphe Appia, who likewise 
wrote and made remarkable and suggestive designs, although his 
influence was less widespread and his ideas less spectacularly 
radical. He urged a new unity—a unity that would emphasize the 
domination of the actor on the stage—and he particularly put for- 
ward the truth that there are great emotional values in lighting, even 
a possible spiritualizing, synthesizing power in light that would go 
far to weld together the then scattered forces of production. He 
had a vision of a sort of formal beauty that had been lost out of the 
theatre for many generations. 

That brings us back to the younger artists, particularly in the 
playhouses of Germany and America, who were nurtured on Craig 
and Appia; for I believe that collectively they have had that vision 


more clearly than the actors, dramatists or so-called producers, and 


354 


certainly they have had most to do with the preparation of the 
actual stage for a new drama. Their revolt accomplished at first 
merely a becoming re-dressing of the current drama, and strictly 
speaking had nothing to do with the development of a modernist 
theatre. To the surviving romantic play they added an eye-filling 
loveliness of lighting, coloring and general decors; and the realistic 
drama they rescued from a too-studied literalness on the one hand 
and the old flapping-canvas absurdity on the other. Through prac- 
ticing the newly-recovered principles of simplicity, suggestion and 
fitness, they added a new visual dignity to the current drama; for 
the first time in the memory of the oldest actor, the play was dressed 
appropriately, richly, honestly, to bring out its own best, if some- 
how over-familiar, points. 

There followed the search for a style in decoration—“‘sty]l- 
ized” Shakespeare, Viennese-decorative mimo-dramas, atmospheric 
Maeterlinck, fantastic dolling-up of dream-plays or nightmare 
plays. But mere betterment of setting, putting old plays in stylish 
clothes, somehow left a bizarrish feel in the eye. When Cubist and 
Expressionist modes of painting came in, these were tried on the 
old girl too—and distracted for the moment, but in the end made 
her look older than ever. But the young decorators were broad 
enough to see before anyone else, when the real signs of a new 
drama arrived, that the carefully studied types of post-Impression- 
istic “scenery” were inadequate, and they met the dramatist half- 
way by discarding decoration entirely and striking out for the 


> They cut out background entirely, arranging fore- 


“formal stage.’ 
stages for the actors to play on, and pools of light for them to play 


in—to the end that the emotional appeal to the audience might be 


355 


more direct, the intensity heightened. It would look as if the in- 
telligent decorator had thus done himself out of his job; but it is 
only the hundredth theatre that has turned even partly modernistic, 
and on Broadway Jones, Geddes, Simonson, Rosse, Bragdon, 
Thompson and Peters can still find plenty to do in the field of dress- 
ing realism or romanticism prettily; and the more imaginative of 
them are turning producers or dreamers of complete productions 
and of new theatres to house them. 

Robert Edmond Jones probably divined the thing that was 
developing in world art, the shift to a search for form, earlier than 
any other artist in the American theatre. His designs for purely 
“formal” productions are among the finest thrusts toward a new 
stage art. One of his conceptions was that “Expressionist produc: 
tion of Macbeth” which went so sadly wrong in the acting; but 
which at its best moments afforded New York audiences occasional 
vistas into an almost unexplored field of abstract beauty. His “‘set- 
tings” cast loose from reality, they were not meant to be even 
“suggestive” of palace rooms, heaths, etc., they were not symbolic 
(although many a spectator read symbolism into the leaning 
“arches” or “windows’); they were conceived as intensifying, 
abstractly, the feeling of dread that hangs over the play. So far 
as settings alone can go, Jones there initiated Expressionism into 
the larger American theatre. And he has greater formal projects 
visualized but as yet unrealized on the stage. 

Without doubt the most imaginative and most fecund of Ameri- 
can modernists in the theatre is Normal-Bel Geddes, who has 
designed a dozen theatres for radical types of production, and who 


has made extraordinary plans for a presentation of a Dante play. 


356 


eo LN Gli Fan wee EN) MACE ETH ,’” 
BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES 


These require the building of a special stage, the synthesis of all the 
elements commonly associated with mimo-drama—music, rhythmic 
movement in mass and individually, color accompaniment—with 
the poetry and the unfoldment of events of the profounder word- 
drama, and the services of perhaps a thousand actors (or slaves). 
The photographs shown here, from Geddes’ model, indicate the 
unusualness, and perhaps suggest something of the beauty, potential 
in the scheme. I think that Geddes and Jones, and perhaps all the 
artists I named in a paragraph above, would agree that the theatre 
to which we are coming (ultimately) depends for its form on a 
developing type of drama; and that the outward mark of that 


drama is a frank theatricality, a confessed employment of the 


357 


means that are typically the theatre’s, total abandonment of 
the realistic illusion, of photographic exactness, of representation 
of life as an end in itself. Its inward content is not life imitated, 
but life condensed, formalized, shaped into a performance by the 
intensification and liberation of emotion in theatric form. It is 
thus not representative, illustrative, descriptive, but expressive, 
presentative, creative. 

Our nearest approach here in America to what is called in 
Europe an “art theatre”’ is to be detected in the New York Theatre 
Guild. It has in general been content to assist in the perfecting 
of realism, with excursions into Shavian intellectualism, and in 
these fields it has achieved an enviable standard of visual produc- 
tion under the guidance of Lee Simonson. But the Guild has also 
served New York audiences modernistically by bringing forth two 
examples of Expressionism, the notable Kaiser play From Morn 
to Midnight, and the native Adding Machine of Elmer Rice—which 
latter, one must add, in its modernistic freedom and intensity really 
showed forth less of formal beauty than of the outpourings of a 
distress-ridden or sex-obsessed mind, like the graphic art of Chagall 
or Grosz and the other members of Dr. Pfister’s repression-outlet 
school. The organization is by no means committed to a “radical” 
or even an experimental program, and until it finds a producing 
director with both vision and strength, it is not likely to establish 
such a soundly forward-looking policy as that of Copeau’s theatre 
in Paris, or even the fairly-modern policy of -he several theatres of 
Fehling, Jessner, and a half-dozen others in Germany. There are 
special difficulties in the way of developing such producing stages 


in America—even greater than those in the way of such independ- 


358 


ent galleries as the “291” of Alfred Stieglitz. The organization of 
the theatre here is such that those of us who make our living by 
dramatic work of one sort or another, as minor cogs in the great 
producing machine, must be content to follow the public taste (or 
what the producers believe to be the public, or best-seller, taste), 
and wait with our really creative ideas until the thousandth chance 
that will allow experiment. For the New York professional theatre’s 
policy is dictated primarily by the necessity of making for non- 
theatrical owners speculative returns on enormous real estate 
values. The whole story with us workers is, I suppose, that we bow 
before this business necessity rather than starve it out on the chance 
that one of our number will survive to put over a new idea. 

But such conditions are subject to change in a world that moves 
as fast as ours of today, a hundred non-commercial little theatres 
out through the country are at least free to try things in their 
cramped way, and the Theatre Guild does have an eye out for 
modernist things with a more or less proven appeal. There are also 
other signs of an impending break in the line-up of things as they 
are. The Provincetown Players, the only important 100-per-cent 
experimental native stage organization in the country, albeit largely 
concerned with realism, begin to export plays to Broadway, and 
have already slipped two Expressionistic plays into their lists. The 
provincial little theatres have served to develop the vision of play- 
wrights and artist-directors, most notably the Chicago Little Theatre 
under Maurice Browne, the Cleveland Playhouse under Raymond 
O’Neill and Frederic McConnell, the Detroit and Berkeley ventures 
under Sam Hume and Irving Pichel, and the live group of “com- 


munity playhouses” on the Coast, from Hollywood, Pasadena and 


359 


Santa Barbara to Vancouver. These are preparatory laboratories 
for the larger experiments to come. In New York there are increas- 
ing signs of receptiveness: there are a few very progressive Broad- 
way producers, like Arthur Hopkins and Brock Pemberton; the 
Neighborhood Playhouse has a daring interest in new things and a 
fine record of experiment; and last season the associated actors, 
under the name “Equity Players,” organized their own theatre, 
and its directors had courage to present Roger Bloomer, the best 
example of native playwriting yet accomplished in the field of 
Expressionism. These projects still come and go—but the spirit 
behind them persists and grows surer. 

Granted that the architectural stage is the typical modernist 
thing, the best-established and perhaps most important producing 
theatre today is the Thédtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris. Here 
Jacques Copeau has experimented with various existing types of 
play on a stage that is an architectural skeleton, into which slightly 
changing backgrounds can be set, although the permanent “plat- 
form” is never disguised. Many a play has taken on new life when 
presented here theatrically and without attempt at fourth-wall illu- 
sion; but as yet Copeau has failed to develop new plays to fit his 
formal stage. There is here, indeed, a curious twist in the modern- 
ist movement; the decorators and producers have developed their 
phase of modernism in the form of a naked stage, and now can’t 
get anything but old plays (of the pre-realistic period) to put on it; 
while the modernist playwrights, with their Expressionistic scripts, 
wanting to play to the “regular” theatre’s audiences and not on the 
side-streets, go into the older playhouses and make the best of 


the stages built like camera-boxes for realistic illusion—and even 


360 


declare that any old stage is good enough for them. Nevertheless, 
the men who are welcoming them into those older proscenium-frame 
houses—and I have in mind especially Jurgen Fehling and Hans 
Strohbach, who put on Masse-Mensch and many another modernist 
play at the Volksbitihne—would build formal stages if they were 
putting up new houses now. Everywhere that is the tendency of 
the progressives; Reinhardt overdid it at the famous Grosse 
Schauspielhaus, but is incorporating the idea into his Salzburg 
theatre; a Brussels theatre has just been built with an enlarged 
Copeau stage, by Copeau’s fellow-worker Louis Jouvet; Elizabethan 
stages continue to be revived in England; the Theatre Guild, after 
scrapping Copeau’s original formal stage when it took over his New 
York playhouse, last winter set up a permanent formal arrange- 
ment, reviving some of Copeau’s conventions, when it presented 
The Tidings Brought to Mary; the Redoutensaal, the gay ballroom 
in the old palace of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, has been remodelled 
to become the most advanced anti-illusionistic theatre anywhere; 
and Germany’s newest generation of regisseurs—most notably 
Fehling and Jessner—clear their stages of “scenery” and get as 
close to a background of “space” as their framed stages will allow. 
That is where the future seems to lie—where the real modernist 
progress has been made; on frankly theatrical stages, by anti- 
realistic directors, in a form of drama, sometimes revived out of 
the pre-realistic period and sometimes drawn from the immature 
Expressionistic playwrights of today, which piles up peculiarly 
theatrical intensity by all the means that belong to the composite 
stage art. Already one may occasionally sit in an auditorium and 


give up to an emotion as profoundly stirring, zesthetically, as that 


361 


evoked by a Matisse painting, the downtown skyscrapers of New 


York, or Lehmbruck’s or Maillol’s sculpture. 


y 


NM 


< 
/ 
) aa 
= 
| 
| 
f | CHort? ~ 
if 
‘sT HE SECOND FROM THE END 15 07A02 2 Clee 


BY WILLIAM GROPP 


AFTERWORD 


. 


Poy 


AFTERWORD 


T has been my hope, in thus spreading out a selective panorama 
of modern art, and particularly in adding chapters about 
architecture and the theatre, that I might afford the reader a hint 
of the breadth and of a certain unity of what is vaguely called 
“the movement.” I have tried to mark out its general direction, 
and to suggest its surface complexion. My plan was to trace it 
from the time when it stemmed from the drying-up main current 
of “the great tradition’—when it accomplished its immediate 
revolt from Impressionism and turned its direction directly away 
from realism—to the confused and confusing present. 

I have been hard put to accomplish any sort of simplification 
of this “modernist” current, to get it down to ponderable terms; 
for it is probably true that if we are to discuss art at all (and I 
still have grave doubts about any virtue in that activity), we must 
strip it to principles, tendencies and currents that the mind can 
get hold of; but truer still that the heart of zsthetics lies beyond 
regions open to the active mind, the essence of creative appreciation 
beyond study and thought. Only by violating the essential thing 
that is art, can one be concerned to analyze it, chart it, or introduce 
anyone to its least manifestation. 

By way of atoning for this violence to the deeper reality, by 
way of restoring a needed balance or unconcernedness, I wish to 
call attention here at the end, as I did in my Foreword, to the 
importance of keeping the border-lines fluid, of widening or freeing 
appreciation rather than narrowing critically to a formula. I am 


alarmed lest some reader may carry away an impression of rolling 


365 


Cezannish form, or geometrical near-abstraction, or Expressionistic 
intensity, as the big and only test of truly modern art, going forth 
to enjoy obediently or damn mercilessly in accordance with a 
principle. I stumble upon a painting like this self-portrait by 
Davringhausen, and ask myself with misgiving whether I have 
kept my definitions wide enough to include it, in spirit, in one 
chapter or another. I drift into Stephan Bourgeois’ gallery to 
enjoy the quiet, child-like things there, and wonder how far I may 
have over-emphasized modernistic intenseness. I ponder on the 
diversity of richness, in both painting and sculpture, in the extraor- 
dinary collection of John Quinn, and I wonder whether it is possible 
to sketch out a current or a period in terms that will do justice to 
all that must be included. 

In short, I not only am at a loss here for words to summarize 
my book, but feel only the urge to free the reader from any “set” 
notions about modern art that I may have imparted. I hope that 
I may have put him somewhat more at ease in the presence of 
“new” painting, sculpture or architecture. Perhaps he will trust 
more to his emotions—and if there are enough of him, that may 
be a considerable blessing. But let him browse in diverse fields, 
let him put up no fences, let him find new eyes esthetically. 

And yet one dogmatic fact stands out—one negative principle 
seems to be back of everything I have talked about, seems to afford 
a starting-point, to comprise a summary: modern art is anti-realistic. 
If we were not still in a preponderantly realistic era, it would be 
unnecessary to repeat that statement. But because one is so sur- 
rounded, in museums, in homes, in magazines, with primarily 
imitative art, one needs to get a glimpse of the havoc wrought by 


366 


Pee OR TRATIC BY HH. M,.DAVRINGHAUSEN 


realism through four centuries, and a release from that obsession, 
before one can enjoy one’s own emotions freely. 

Magazine art is one of the things I had hoped to come back to 
before finishing the book. In publications like Playboy, Pearson’s 
and The Liberator there is much that is creative and emotional, 
and even in caricature and illustration there are qualities that 
redeem the works from the old literalness and sweetness. There 
are workers in black-and-white like Hugo Gellert, Horace Brodzky, 
William Gropper, Hunt Diederich, Adolph Dehn, Winold Reiss 
and Bertram Hartman, who bring a modern directness and emo- 
tionalism to the printed pages that pass before us month by 
month. And there are cartoonists who have freed themselves for 


more than mere imitative-satiric comment. Such assuredly are 


367 


Art Young, Robert Minor and Boardman Robinson—and who 
would exclude from an effective anti-realism such “comic” creators 
as Fontaine Fox and Rube Goldberg? In a different direction 
there are the intimate media of wood-engraving and lithography, 
bringing modernism within the means of those who cannot hope 
ever to own paintings or works of sculpture. A man like Davies, 
who fails a little of freeing himself from the past in his paintings, 
is at his intensest and best in his prints. And there are beautiful 
emotional things being accomplished on wood by the younger 
artists in France and Germany. Indeed, the pervasiveness of 
modern art is one of the most notable things about it. 

When I came to New York six or seven years ago I happened 
upon the landscape by Cezanne in the Metropolitan Museum. I 
don’t remember that it particularly impressed me in an emotional 
way at first; but as I visited the Museum time after time, the 
painting grew upon my consciousness until it spoke to me more 
clearly, more movingly, than any other picture in the post- 
Rembrandt rooms. That one painting came near to accomplishing, 
alone, the revolution in my own art faith. The pleasure I found 
in it—not even one of Cezanne’s best in achievement, but full of 
his striving for “realization”—came nearer to setting things right 
with me in art appreciation than anything else I had experienced. 
The miles of surrounding paintings began to look very obvious, to 
confess themselves for what they were, works of illustration, faith- 
fully exact, prettily colored and technically impressive. 

The lack of other modern works in the Museum—so that I looked 
to the Cezanne corner as the culmination of each visit—may have 
served to emphasize the thing that lies beyond the surface, may 


368 


Poe EW SKY. BY HUGO GELLERT 


have intensified the emotional appeal. There, so far as painting 
was concerned, I found new eyes. I was not chasing theories; the 
canvas simply spoke to me, emotionally, expressively, intensely, 
joyously. The only thing I had to fit me for the experience was a 
wholesome dissatisfaction with imitative, realistic art. 

No one can explain exactly the mystery of personal esthetic 
appreciation. But I am sure that once you get some conception 
of what you have cut yourself off from by insisting upon the 
imitative canon in art—what regions of pure emotional joyousness 
you have foregone—you will find a new freedom of appreciation 
coming upon you, and works like this painting of Cezanne’s, or 
Davies’ prints, or Wright’s architecture, or an Expressionistic drama 
like Masse-Mensch, speaking to you, bringing forgetfulness of your 


369 


mind and your body, putting you into an ecstasy of the spirit. We 
have been through literal, materialistic times. But I have faith that 
spirituality constantly is reborn into the world. Our children 
ordinarily have it, until we drive it out of them by way of “fitting 
them for the world.” The artist has it in greater measure than 
other people; but he too has been driven to a conformity, a com- 
promise with the literal world, for some centuries past. Modern 
art seems to me to be a sign that we are getting back to an appre- 
ciation of the spiritual-emotional element in life: the artists’ anti- 
literal, emotionally expressive activity, amounting to a spiritual 
overflow, is no less eloquent of the change than is the increasing 
receptiveness, the fast widening appreciation on the part of a 
“public.” The cycle is almost complete: we have got almost back 
to that point where the recurring spirituality is conserved, where 
emotion is valued, where esthetic experience is recognized as valid 
in its own right, without reference to naturalness, sweetness, etc. 


What we need most, to get over the rest of the circle, is a background 


of open-mindedness. 


DRAWING BY FERNAND LEGER 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


PAGE 


SELF-PORTRAIT, BY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA _. ; : ; r ‘ ‘ : ; 3 
By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin 

ON THE BALL, BY PABLO PICASSO . : : ; ; ; ; ; . . 7 
From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Paul Feshiey 

TORSO, BY ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO : ; ; : : : ‘ ; : , 10 
By courtesy of Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 

LANDSCAPE WITH STREAM, BY KISLING . : ‘ . ; , : ‘ 2 13 
By courtesy of Hans Goltz, Munich 

MUSIC—BLACK, BLUE AND GREEN, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE . : : ‘ 14 
By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz 

ETCHING BY EDWIN SCHARFF : : : : 16 
From DEUTSCHE GRAPHIKER DER GEGENW ART, eh Kurt akter 

THE DANCE, BY HENRI MATISSE . : . : 7 . : ; : : ; 19 
By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris 

HORSE—GREEK SCULPTURE A ; F eae ; : : : : 5s oe 
By courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of ve 

CAVE DRAWING : f é : ‘ : : ‘ : ‘ : ee ey 
From HISTORY OF ART, os Elie ake 

DRAWING BY PABLO PICASSO : . : : A 4 : : ; , 2 2G 

THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN, BY EL GRECO : - ‘ ; 5 ; 2S 
By courtesy of The National Gallery, London 

DOUBLE PORTRAIT, BY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA ene mee Fig ey me es 020 
By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin 

DRAWING BY DAVID BURLIUK . : : : ; ‘ : ‘ : F : Vat 

LOWER MANHATTAN, BY JOHN MARIN _. i ; ; : : : p : : 35 
By courtesy of Alfred Stieghtz 

THE BATH OF PSYCHE, BY FREDERICK LEIGHTON . 5 : . ; . -) ¥ 40 
By courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London 

TIGER, BY FRANZ MARC : : : ‘ é : ‘ : ; ; a ae 
From EXPRESSIONISMUS, by ee. SBahe 

SCRIABIN, BY TEIDORS ZALKALNS _. ; é : Sead 
From ARCHITEKTONIK des PLASTISCHEN, by Paul Waesthene 

BATHERS, BY GUSTAVE COURBET : i ; : : : : ; . : Pea © 
By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris 

BATHERS, BY PAUL CEZANNE : : ‘ A : : : . ; : Be, 
By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris 

BATHERS, BY OTTO MUELLER : : : : ; . ; * = te 
By courtesy of THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO 

BATHERS, BY PAUL CEZANNE ? : 7 3 : 3 : : oe 


From CEZANNE, published by Be lenae yee 
371 


PAGE 
TAHITIANS, BY PAUL GAUGUIN: .0.5 2s 6 0 5 


By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris 


WOODCUT BY BEWICK : A ‘ ee 
From A BRIEF HISTORY OF WOOD- ENGRAVING, By Tosehe Cundall 

WOODCUT—FOURTEENTH CENTURY . ‘ é : 5 F . : s, | 86 
From DAS HOLZSCHNITTBUCH, by Paul Wiehe 

CHRIST ON CROSS—GERMAN SCULPTURE, ABOUT 1200 . ‘ ; ; ; i. 86 
By courtesy of the Germanisches Museum, Nuremburg 

THE CHURCH—DRAWING BY MASEREEL ‘ ¢ . . ; ; é , + 6S 

OLD WOMAN WITH A STICK, BY ERNST BARLACH . ; ; ; ; : oe te eg 
By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin 

BROOKLYN BRIDGE, BY JOSEPH STELLA . : : { ; : 4 : : ia Os 

FROM MY PARIS WINDOW, BY MARC CHAGALL . : P ; ; : : ¢ > 766 

EIFFEL TOWER, BY ROBERT DELAUNAY . : ; : ; ; , . : tee 

PAINTING BY HEINRICH CAMPENDONK 69 

AUTOMOBILE 71 
By courtesy of Buick toy Car Conta 

LOCOMOTIVE 


By courtesy of New York Contra Ratlroed 


IMPRESSION: SETTING SUN, BY CLAUDE MONET : 
From LES PEINTRES IMPRESSIONISTES, by Theodore Duret 
By courtesy of E. Weyhe 


PAINTING BY PAUL SIGNAC 
From QUELQUES PEINTRES, by je Werth 
NUDE SEATED, BY F. C. FRIESEKE 
By courtesy:of the Macbeth Gallery, New York 
HARBOR AT MARSEILLES, BY MAURICE DE VLAMINCK 
By courtesy of John Quinn 
LANDSCAPE, BY PAUL CEZANNE é 
From CEZANNE, published by Bernheim- pres Par 
LANDSCAPE, BY OSKAR KOKOSCHKA 
By courtesy of Paul Cassirer, Berlin 
LANDSCAPE, BY VINCENT VAN GOGH 
FRAGMENT OF PAINTING BY PAUL GAUGUIN . : ‘ : : P Oy 
From GAUGUIN, by Robert Rey 
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL, BY EDWARD MUNCH . - ; A f : ; ; fa Og 
From GANYMED, 1922 
PORTRAIT OF MME. CEZANNE, BY PAUL CEZANNE . 3 F p : , ep EOS 
From CEZANNE, by Gustave Coquiot 
PAINTING BY HENRI MATISSE 
From QUELQUES PEINTRES, by Léon Werth 
WOODCUT BY MAURICE DE VLAMINCK 
WATERCOLOR BY PAUL CEZANNE , 
CARRIERES ST. DENIS, BY GEORGES BRAQUE. 
From BRAQUE, by Maurice Raynal 
DRAWING BY PABLO PICASSO 
From PICASSO, by Maurice Raynal 


372 


Ior 


102 


WOMAN WITH A MANDOLIN, BY PABLO PICASSO 
From DER WEG ZUM KUBISMUS, by Daniel Henry 
WOMAN WITH A MANDOLIN, BY PABLO PICASSO 
From MODERN PAINTING: ITS TENDENCY AND MEANING 
by Willard Huntington Wright 
MAN WITH A MANDOLIN, BY PABLO PICASSO 
From PICASSO, by Maurice Raynal 
THRER PEOPLE SEATED; BY ALBERT GLEIZES 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 
FUMEUR ET PAYSAGE, BY FERNAND LEGER 
From MODERN PAINTING: ITS TENDENCY AND MEANING 
by Willard Huntington Wright 
WINTER, BY KANDINSKY : 
By courtesy of DER STURM Sally Bevin 
BUST OF RUDOLF BLUEMNER, BY WILLIAM WAUER 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 
VOLLERSRODA, BY LIONEL FEININGER 
In the National Gallery, Berlin 
CAFE SCENE, BY GINO SEVERINI ; 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 
MARINETTI—DRAWING BY N. KULBIN ’ 
From NEUE KUNST IN RUSSLAND, by Rone ontin Comets 
DOG IN LEASH, BY GIACOMO BALLA 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 


DYNAMISM OF AN AUTO, BY LUIGI RUSSOLO 


MOE CUL IS RES hu LORISTES, PASSEISTES, by Cave Coneine 


FUNERAL OF THE ANARCHIST GALLI, BY CARLO D. CARRA 
From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Paul Fechter 


SCULPTURE, BY UMBERTO BOCCIONI 


MromeokototeSshOULURIST ES, PASSEISTES, Hop eer fare eee 


FLIGHT, BY EDWARD McKNIGHT KAUFFER 
From THE APPLE, 1920 
PEGASUS, BY ODILON REDON 
From a photograph by Hagelstein Bros. 
EXOTIC LANDSCAPE, BY HENRI ROUSSEAU 
From ROUSSEAU, by Roch Grey 
LA BAIGNADE, BY GEORGES SEURAT 
From SEURAT, by Andre Lhote 
ROTTERDAM, BY EDWARD WADSWORTH 
From BLAST 
ON THE WAY TO THE TRENCHES, BY C. R. W. NEVINSON 
From BLAST 
MINERS’ BAR, BY GEORG GROSZ ; : 
From MUSTERBOOK I, by courtesy of Hit Samah 
FACTORIES, BY GEORG GROSZ : : 
From MUSTERBOOK I, by courtesy of Hi Sinone 
WATERCOLOR—TUNIS, BY PAUL KLEE é 
From PAUL KLEE, by Leopold Zahn 


PAGE 
103 


104 


105 
107 


108 


109 
110 
132 
115 
116 
119 
ior 
122 
123 
124 
126 
129 
132 
134 
135 


137 


138 


141 


373 


PAGE 
WOODCUT BY KURT SCHWITTERS : : 


: : é ‘ ; : : ; oo BLA: 
From DER ARARAT, 1920 3 

PORTRAIT OF TRISTAN TZARA, BY FRANCIS PICABIA . E : ‘ : ye gels 
From THE CHAPBOOK, 1920 

“PAINTING” BY KURT SCHWITTERS : : ; : é ; : : TnL, 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 

DESIGN FOR MONUMENT, BY VLADIMIR TATLIN ; : : : : ; . 148 
From Friihlicht, 1922 

COSMIC SYNCHROMY, BY MORGAN RUSSELL . : F 150 
From THE FORUM EXHIBITION OF MODERN AMERICAN PAINTERS 


By courtesy of Mitchell Kennerley 
ORGANIZATION 5s, BY S. MACDONALD-WRIGHT 


: 153 
Frum THE FORUM EXHIBITION OF MODERN AMERICAN PAINTERS 
By courtesy of Mitchell Kennerley 
WOODCUT BY KANDINSKY : : 154 
From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Poul eee 
IMPRESSION—MOSCOW, BY KANDINSKY 157 
From THE ART OF SPIRITUAL HARMONY, by Koigeen 
IMPROVISATION, BY KANDINSKY ; 161 
Fyrom CUBIS TS = ANDAEO Silk IMPRESSIONISM, by ae Seneone Eddy 
DRAWING BY HELEN TORR 163 
COMPOSITION, BY KANDINSKY ; : 165 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 
PAINTING BY GEORG MUCHE : 166 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 
MOVEMENT, BY MARSDEN HARTLEY 169 
Fron THE FORUM EXHIBITION OF MODERN AMERICAN PAINTINGS — 
By courtesy of Mitchell Kennerley 
ROCKS AND SEA, MAINE, BY JOHN MARIN 170 
By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz 
WATERCOLOR—OPUS 120, 1918, BY PAUL KLEE 171 
From KUNST, by Clive Bell (German edition) 
TIERSCHICKSALE, BY FRANZ MARC 7g 
By courtesy of DER STURM Gallery, Berlin 
LAMPSHADE, BY MAN RAY 174 


By courtesy of Societe Anonyme, New Vore 
FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR BY THOMAS WILFRED . i 2 s; EOE 
Photograph by Francts Bruguiere 
FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR BY THOMAS WILFRED 


182 

Photograph by Francis Brugutere 

FORMS PROJECTED IN MOBILE COLOR BY THOMAS WILFRED 183 
Photograph by Francis Brugutere 

COS COB, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, 2 - 188 
By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz 

MAINE—THE SAIL BOAT, BY JOHN MARIN 3 IgI 
By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz ‘ 

LITHOGRAPH BY FRANZ MARC : 193 
From FRANZ MARC: BRIEFE, AUFZEICHNUNGEN UND APHORISMEN 

STILL LIFE, BY HENRL MATISSE 198 


37 4 


PROPHET, BY EMIL NOLDE : : ‘A 6 ; : 6 5 
LANDSCAPE, BY ERICH HECKEL . : ‘ - : 
By courtesy of THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO 
WOMAN WITH CAT, BY MAX PECHSTEIN 
From DER EXPRESSIONISMUS, by Paul Fechter 
GIRL CARRYING WATER, BY JOSEPH BERNARD 
Photograph by Hagelstein Bros. 
AUTUMN HARVEST, BY OTHON FRIESZ 
By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris 
ITALIAN WOMAN, BY ANDRE DERAIN 
From DERAIN, by Carlo Carra 
CIRCUS, BY MARIE LAURENCIN 
By courtesy of Paul Rosenberg, Parts 


DRAWING BY BORIS GRIGORIEFF . 
LAKE GEORGE, BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE 
By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz 


FLOWER FORMS, BY CHARLES SHEELER 
PORTRAIT, BY BORIS GRIGORIEFF 

From RASSEJA, by Boris Grigorieff 
PORTRAIT, BY KEES VAN DONGEN ‘ 

By courtesy of THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIO 


SILVER MATCHBOX, BY DAGOBERT PECHE 
By courtesy of THE WIENER WERKSTAETTE OF AMERICA 


CAUCUS, BY WALT KUHN . . 

NEW YORK, BY ABRAM WALKOWITZ 

SKETCH FOR PAINTING, BY ARTHUR G. DOVE 

PORTRAIT, BY WALT KUHN 

HOUSE AND TREE FORMS, BY CHARLES DEMUTH 
By courtesy of the Daniel Gallery 

PORTRAIT OF A PEASANT GIRL, BY MAURICE STERNE 
By courtesy of Stephan Bourgeois 

REDWOODS, BY ARTHUR B. DAVIES 
By courtesy of the Ferargil Gallery 

FACADE, BY ARTHUR B. DAVIES 
By courtesy of the Ferargil Gallery 

PORTRAIT, BY ALBERT BLOCK 

WASHINGTON BRIDGE, BY PRESTON DICKINSON 
By courtesy of the Daniel Gallery 


NEW MEXICO, BY MARSDEN HARTLEY .. : ‘ : 5 : 6 é 
By courtesy of Alfred Stieglitz 

SECLUSION, BY MAX WEBER . : ; A . ‘ c are ° 5 
From PLAYBOY, 1923 

PAINTED POTTERY, BY VARNUM POOR . 5 ; é : é ; 6 
By courtesy of the Montross Gallery 

REROSE. BY ARCHIPENKO , : ‘ 5 < . . ° e ° A 

HEAD, BY GASTON LACHAISE fs : . : ° 0 c ° e ; 


Photograph by de Witt C. Ward 


PAGE 


201 


203 


205 


208 


21I 


212 


214 


PAGE 


THE KISS, BY RODIN. - : 3 : ‘ & - > A : 5 : ee) 

THE DANCER, BY GEORG KOLBE . ; ‘ 3 : c : 4 A ‘ Z Seer 

BALZAC, BY RODIN : : ; ; ° : : : - : : 5 81 

SEATED FIGURE, BY ARISTIDE “MAILLOL pi : 3 ; A F < : A els 
By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris 

HEAD OF A GIRL, BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL ‘ : ° ° ° e 3 c - 269 
By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris 

DANCER AND GAZELLES, BY PAUL MANSHIP ; 5 : . - - c eae 
By courtesy of Scott and Fowles 

FIGURE, BY EDWIN SCHARFF . : : ; : , : : é ; : . ere 
From DER ARARAT, 1921 

EVENING, BY JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE . F 4 A “ 5 < : -« 274 

THREE FREE, BY JOHN MOWBRAY-CLARKE . f : é ( : A A = 276 

SEATED FIGURE, BY GAUDIER-BRZESKA ., 4 A - 4 Z : . i 3 278 
By courtesy of John Quinn 

MOTHERA AND  GHIED. BY JACOB BESTEL c ‘ 2 : ‘ 5 4 F = 282 
By courtesy of the John Lane Company 

FIGURE, BY FRANZ METZNER . : . ; 5 : ; , - A 3 1203 
From NEUERE PLASTIK, by Alfred Ri 

TORSO bet hiG= Gileleaee ; 3 z z : : 5 g wees 
From SCULPTURE OF TODAY, oe pen pore 

NEGRO SCULPTURE 5 : 6 ‘ - a : A s 3 Ae PANS 
From NEGERPLASTIK, by Gor Einstein ' 

NEGRO SCULPTURE “ , : : : : : <a . iy, 
From NEGERPLASTIK, by con Biase 

MUSE, BY BRANCUSI ‘ : : : : : : : F : : : - 290 

ANDANTE, BY OSWALD HERZOG ‘ ; : f : , i A : ; 5 = 8) 2Hr 

DANCER, BY HERTA MUELLER-SCHULDA : i : ; z seo2 
From DER FORMWILLE DER ZEIT, by L. W. Rochomenee 

STATUETTES, BY ARCHIPENKO : : é ; : : : : A 5 : ; (2295 
By courtesy of Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 

KNEELING FIGURE, BY WILHELM LEHMBRUCK . zi 5 5 - F A ; 2096 
Photograph by Hagelstein Bros. 

MOTHER AND CHILD, BY WILHELM LEHMBRUCK . : : . 3 4 7209 

WOMAN, BY GASTON LACHAITISE . : ‘ : A 4 F 5 : 2 - 22 g00 
Photograph by de Witt C. Ward 

RISING WOMAN, BY GEORGE GREY BARNARD 3 5 ‘ ‘ é ‘ . 7 gon 
Photograph by Van der Wyde 

MASK OF MRS. EPSTEIN, BY JACOB EPSTEIN F , é : A ; 5 asOs 
By courtesy of John Quinn 

CHRIST, BY JACOB EPSTEIN : : é c 5 - S A c : : : - 304 
By courtesy of the John Lane Company 

WOMAN, BY DUCHAMP-VILLON “ 5 ° ° e ° . e . ° > - 306 
By courtesy of John Quinn 

PANEL, BY ERNST BARLACH e ° = ¢ ° a e e e t} eo e e 307 


In the National Gallery, Berlin 


376 


PAGE 


BAS-RELIEF, BY ARISTIDE MAILLOL 


e ° e e e e 8 

_ By courtesy of the Galerie E. Druet, Paris vi 

A STUDY IN CATS, BY HUNT DIEDERICH . “ A ‘ A : : F 309 
Photograph by Van der Wyde 

PANEL, BY DUCHAMP-VILLON . 5 : : A : A : : : 3 : es LO 
By courtesy of John Quinn 

SKETCH BY ERICH MENDELSOHN ; : : . ‘ ‘ : , : : eR 

SKETCH BY ROB MALLET-STEVENS ; : ; ; : A URE 

EXPOSITION BUILDING AT COLOGNE, BY JOSEPH HOFFMANN : 2 . es 1 7, 
By courtesy of thee WIENER WERKSTAETTE 

EXPOSITION BUILDING, BY BRUNO TAUT AND JOSEPH HOFFMANN . 5 BisaG) 

DESIGN FOR A GARAGE, BY ROB MALLET-STEVENS ., : : : ; : 2 ee 
From UNE CITE MODERN 

DOWNTOWN NEW YORK : : ; : : 4 j : : 6 Bee 
Copyright photograph by Underwood we Under pine 

BUSH TERMINAL SALES BUILDING, BY HELMLE AND CORBETT : ‘ 5 Bey 

MODEL FOR MAGDEBURG MUNICIPAL BUILDINGS, BY BRUNO TAUT . e320 
By courtesy of Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 

SKYSCRAPER DESIGN, BY HANS SOEDER . - : : : : ‘ : ; es 27 
By courtesy of Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 

THE LARKIN FACTORY, BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT ‘ ; é ; : 3 20 

HOUSE BYehRANK LLOYD WRIGHT . ‘ 3 : : : ; 5 EEO 

DESIGN FOR AERODROME, BY ERICH MENDELSOHN > : : : é : s Bee 
By courtesy of THE DIAL 

WOOLWORTH BUILDING, BY CASS GILBERT . : ; : 3 : ; : wees 32 
Copyright photograph by Underwood and Underwood 

SreicrerY WENZEL HABLIK . : : : ‘ ; 3 ; 5 eigye 

MOVEMENT—FROM AN ETCHING BY GORDON CRAIG : : : 4 ‘ 5 eye 
From CAMERA WORK 

MODEL FOR “DANTE,’ BY NORMAN BEL-GEDDES : : : ‘ : ; 5 Be 
Photograph by Francis Bruguiere 

MODEL FOR “DANTE,” BY NORMAN BEL-GEDDES é : : : . : Se) BRO 
Photograph by Francis Bruguiere 

OPENING SCENE IN “MACBETH,” BY ROBERT EDMOND JONES . : 357 

“THE SECOND FROM THE END IS A PEACH ...,’ BY WILLIAM GROPPER 362 

SELF-PORTRAIT, BY H. M. DAVRINGHAUSEN . . ‘ ; : : : ‘ re aOF 
By courtesy of Hans Goltz Gallery, Munich 

PADEREWSKY, BY HUGO GELLERT 4 ; . : A 5 ‘ 6 A : . 369 
By courtesy of Pearson's Magazine 

DRAWING BY FERNAND LEGER 4 : ; : . ° e ° ° : ; 5 REE 


377 


INDEX 


Abstraction, 157 

African negro carving, 24 

Angelo, Michael, 27, 51, 85, 252, 257, 302 
Anglin, Margaret, 341 

Anisfeld, 225 

Appia, Adolphe, 354 

Archipenko, 254, 267, 273, 275, 292, 305 
Architecture, 308, 313 

Assyrian art, 25 


Bahr, Hermann, 193 

Baldung, 29 

Balla, Giacomo, 118 

Barker, Granville, 345 
Barlach, Ernst, 63, 305 
Barnard, George Grey, 300 
Barnard, Joseph, 213 
Barnsdall Theatre, 328 

Bauer, Rudolph, 168 

Behrens, Peter, 325, 328 
Belasco, David, 351 

Bell, Clive, Foreword, 39, 45, 61, 229 
Bell, Vanessa, 229 

Belling, Rudolf, 288 

Bellows, George, 82 

Berkeley little theatre, 359 
Berlage, A. P., 62, 325 

Bistolfi, 262 

Blake, William, 50 

Bluemner, Oscar, 233, 242 
Bluemner, Rudolf, 273 
Boccioni, 124 

Botticelli, 27 

Bouché, Louis, 242 
Bouguereau, 11, 23 

Bourgeois, Stephan, 130, 366 
Bragdon, Claude, 171, 187, 365 
Brancusi, 232, 290 

Braque, Georges, 104, 199, 206, 210, 232 
Brodzky, Horace, 367 


Browne, Maurice, 359 
Bruce, Henry Patrick, 242 
Brueghel, 70 

Burliuk, 225 

Byzantine art, 26 


Campendonk, Heinrich, 68, 70, 205 

Canova, 254 

Carpeaux, 252, 259, 298 

Carra, Carlo D, 122 

Cezanne, Paul, 19, 27, 30, 41, 48, 51, 69, 
Hi OU moo en LOU; ehl?, 122. 1245127. 
149, 154, 158, 191, 199, 202, 204, 210, 
Bi oemee lawns eee Sl 231. 2A 252 Ib). 
264, 270, 297, 349, 366, 368 

Chagall, Marc, 68, 206, 225, 358 

Chavannes, Puvis de, 29 

Clavilux Color Organ, 178 

Cleveland Playhouse, 359 

Constable, 29, 77, 158, 229 

Copeau, Jacques, 360 

Corbett, 325 

Correggio, 28 

Courbet, 47, 50, 77, 86 

Craig, Gordon, 116, 223; 352 

Cram, Ralph Adams, 331 

Cranach, 29 

Cubism, 42, 69, 81, 98, 256, 271 


Dadaism, 112, 139, 207 
Dasburg, Andrew, 168, 242 
Daumier, 30, 77 

David, 76 

Davies, Arthur B., 82, 112, 241, 245, 368 
Davis, Stuart, 243 
Davringhausen, 366 

Degas, 86 

Dehn, Adolph, 367 
Delacroix, 76, 78, 150, 158 
Delaunay, 110 


379 


del Sarto, 50 

Demuth, Charles, 82, 237 

Derain, Andre, 4, 82, 210, 237, 343 
Detroit little theatre, 359 
Dickinson, Preston, 242 

Diederich, Hunt, 271, 275, 275, 367 
Donatello, 252 

Dove, Arthur G., 82, 233, 238 
Dubois, Guy Péne, 243 

Dufy, 213 

Duchamp-Villon, 275, 305, 307 
Duncan, Isadora, 343 

Dtirer, 29 

Dutch genre painters, 23 


Eberz, Joseph, 206 

Egyptian art, 24 

El Greco, 27, 30, 41, 51, 60, 85, 92, 159 

English art, 29, 228 

Epstein, Jacob, 63, 230, 244, 262, 267, 
302 

Equity Players, 360 

Expressionism, 41, 59, 69, 85, 195, 201, 
210, 214,228, 273, 279, 298, 3477356, 
360, 369 


Faggi, Alfeo, 298 

Fehling, Jurgen, 361 

Feininger, Lionel, 111, 206, 244 
Ferguson, J. D., 229 

Flint, F. S., 140 

Forain, 68 

Foujita, 214 

Fox, Fontaine, 368 

French art, 29, 207, 221 

French Court Painters, 22 
French, Daniel Chester, 252, 298 
Fresnaye, de la, 213 

Friesz, Othon, 82, 210 

Fry, Roger, 229 

Futurism, 114, 210 


Gainsborough, 22 

Gaudier, 63, 275, 280, 282, 288 

Gauguin, 11, 19, 54, 86, 89, 198, 204, 305, 
343 

Geddes, Norman Bel, 356 

Geiger, 232 

Gellert, Hugo, 367 


380 


German art, 29, 199, 222 
Gertler, Mark, 229 

Gill, Eric, 230, 283 

Gilbert, Cass, 328 

Gilman, Harold, 229 

Giotto, 22, 31, 159 

Gleizes, Albert, 107, 120 
Goldberg, Rube, 368 

Goll, Ivan, 293 

Goncharova, 225 

Goodhue, Bertram, 331 

Gothic art, 26, 31, 60, 257, 313 
Grant, Duncan, 82, 229 

Greek art, 20, 24 

Greek Theatre at Berkeley, 341 
Greuze, 23 

Grigorieff, 225 

Gris, Juan, 108 

Gropper, William, 367 

Grosz, Georg, 68, 141, 145, 358 


Hale, Gardner, 243 
Halpert, Samuel, 242 
Hambridge, Jay, 153 
Hammer, Trygve, 298 
Hanak, Anton, 265 


Hartley, Marsden, 82, 232, 233, 237 


Hartman, Bertram, 367 
Hassam, Childe, 80, 82. 
Hecht, Zoltan, 243 
Heckel, Erich, 82, 202, 205, 298 
Helmle & Corbett, 325 
Henri, Robert, 82 
Herzog, 290 
Hildebrand, 258 
Hodler, 94, 223 
Hofer, Karl, 202 
Hoffmann, 227, 320 
Holbein, 29 

Hopkins, Arthur, 360 
Howard, Cecil, 298 
Hume, Sam, 359 


Impressionism, 60, 73, 230, 255, 263 


Ingres, 76 


Jawlensky, 225 
Jessner, 361 


John, Augustus, 132 Marc, Franz, 43, 111, 173, 199, 204 


Jones, Robert Edmond, 356 Marées, Hans von, 29 
Jonson, Raymond, 243 Marin, John, 19, 36, 54, 82, 124. 172, 
Jouvet, Louis, 361 QdL 9200, o2an6 219 
“Junge-Kunst,” 204 Marriott, Charles, 45 
Masereel, 63 
Kaiser, Georg, 347, 358 Matisse, Henri, 4, 19, 51, 81, 94, 111, 
Kandinsky, Vasily, 44, 51, 82, 110, 159, dee Lee 20] 209 22136-22128 231, 286, 
1702 200.8225, 236, 279 Uy stays 
Kauffer, E. McKnight, 124, 244 Maurer, Alfred, 233 
Kaus, Max, 202 Maybeck, Bernard, 330 
Kent, Rockwell, 243 McConnell, Frederic, 359 
Kirchner, Ludwig E., 202 McFee, Henry L., 242 
Kisling, 214 Medgyzes, Ladislas, 287 
Klee, Paul, 68, 70, 82, 141, 172, 201 Meier-Graefe, 262, 265 
Klein, Cesar, 202, 205 Mendelsohn, Erich, 63, 313, 325, 328 
Klerk, de, 325 Messel, Alfred, 325 
Kokoschka, Oskar, 3, 19, 54, 82, 87, 124, Mestrovic, 270 
201, 204, 213, 279, 298, 349 Metropolitan Museum, 8, 27, 245, 251, 
Kolbe, George, 264, 266 368 
Kolig, 227 Metzinger, Jean, 108 
Kramer, 325 Metzner, Franz, 282, 309 
Kroll, 82 Meunier, 63 
Kuhn, Walt, 19, 82, 172, 232 Meyerhold, 346 
Miller, Kenneth H., 242 
Lachaise, 63, 254, 275, 298 Minor, Robert, 368 
Larionoff, 214, 225 Mobile Color, 176 
Laurencin, Marie, 82, 213 Monet, 75, 77, 259 
Lavery, Sir John, 15 Moscow Art Theatre, 346 
Lawson, Ernest, 82 Mowbray-Clarke, John, 275 
Lawson, John Howard, 348 Mueller, Otto, 202 
Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 63, 262, 297, 362 Mueller-Schulda, Herta, 292 
Leighton, 11, 39, 48, 298 Munch, Edward, 93, 199, 223 
Leonardo, 27 Murillo, 28, 52 
Lewis, Wyndham, 82, 133, 135, 139, 229 
Lhote, 213 Nadelman, 232 
Lipschitz, Jacques, 292 Nash, Paul, 229 
Littmann, Max, 325 Nauen, Heinrich, 202, 205 
Luckhardt Brothers, 325 Negro sculpture, 24, 284 
Luthman, 328 Neo-Classicists, 252 
Lutyens, E. iia 329 Nevinson, C. W. R., 138, 229 
Nolde, Emil, 202, 204, 298 
Macdonald-Wright, 63, 82, 151, 187, 242, 
244 Olbrich, J. M., 325 
Maeterlinck, 345, 355 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 82, 171, 232, 238 
Maillol, Aristide, 63, 265, 309, 362 O’Neill, Raymond, 359 
Mallet-Stevens, Rob, 315, 320 
Manet, 77, 86, 90, 92, 94, 259 Pach, Walter, 242 
Manship, Paul, 270, 284, 286, 298 Pandick, John, 243 


381 


Peche, Dagobert, 227 

Pechstein, Max, 82, 202, 204 

Pemberton, Brock, 360 

Pfister, Dr. Oskar, 195, 207 

Picabia, Francis, 108, 232 

Picasso, Pablo, 4, 51, 82, 99, 104, 109, 
127, 6160, 1992-201. 206, 209: 213; 232, 
240, 286, 343, 349 

Piccirilli, Attilio, 298 

Pichel, Irving, 359 

Pissarro, 84 

Poor, Varnum, 242 

Post-Impressionism, 73, 232, 284, 355 

Pound, Ezra, Foreword, 132, 136, 282 

Poupelet, Jane, 265 

Poussin, 29 

Praxiteles, 22, 252 

Pre-Raphaelite School, 22, 27 

Purrmann, Hans, 82, 205 


Quinn, John, Foreword, 209, 366 


Raphael) 20; 22, 27,.52 

Ray, Man, 242 

Redon, Odilon, 127, 132, 168 

Reinhardt, Max, 361 

Reiss, Winold, 367 

Rembrandt, 159 

Renaissance, 22, 27 

Renault, 213 

Rice, Anne Estelle, 244 

Rice, Elmer, 348, 358 

Robinson, Boardman, 368 

Rodin, Atgust..15; 03, 252, 202, 2o0.se09, 
268, 273, 297, 30], 309 

Roeder, Emi, 288 

Roerich, 225 

Rogers, John Gamble, 333 

Roman art, 26, 31 

Rosse, 356 

Rosso, Medardo, 262 

Rousseau, Henri, 128, 232, 240 

Rubens, 85 

Russell, Morgan, 152, 244 

Russian art, 225 

Russian ballet, 210 

Russolo, 121 


382 


é 


Sargent, John S., 3, 11, 50 
Scharff, 273 

Schiele, Egon, 227 
Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 202, 204, 288 
Schwitters, Kurt, 145 

Scott, M. H. Baillie, 329 
Sculpture, 251 

Segonzac, 213 

Seurat, -79, 132 

Severini, Gino, 119 

Shaw, George B., 340, 345 

Sheeler, 82 

Simonson, Lee, 356 

Sloan, 82 

Sluyters, Jan, 226 

Soudekin, 225 

Stanislavsky, Constantin, 346 
Stella, Joseph, 64, 82, 123, 130, 141 
Sterne, Maurice, 82, 241, 298 
Stieglitz, Alfred, Foreword, 232, 233 
St. Gaudens, Augustus, 252, 258 
Strnad, 320 

Strohbach, Hans, 361 

Stursa, Jan, 265, 273 

Sullivan, Louis, 62, 322, 325 
Symbolism, 48 

Synchromism, 149, 242 

Szukalski, 298 


Tatlin, Vladimir, 145, 148 
Taut, Bruno, 63, 325 
Teschner, Richard, 227 
Theatre, 337 

Theatre du Vieux Colombier, 360 
Theatre Guild, 358, 361 
Theotokopulos, 27 
Thorwaldsen, 254 
Tintoretto, 31, 85, 159 
Titian, 27 

Tofel, Jennings, 130 
Toller, Ernst, 348 
Toorop, Jan, 226 

Torr, Helen, 171 
Toulouse-Lautrec, 68 
Turner, 29, 77, 150, 158 
“291” group, 238 

Tzara, Tristan, 139 
Urban, Joseph, 227, 320 


Van Dongen, 82, 226 

van Gogh, Vincent, 88, 199, 204, 225 
Van Heemskerck, Jacoba, 226 
Vijdeve!d, 325 

Vlaminck, Maurice de, 82, 88, 210 
Vorticists, 124, 133, 135, 138, 199, 227 


Wadsworth, Edward, 138, 229 
Wagner, Otto, 325 

Walden, Nell, 168 

Walkowitz, Abram, 82, 238, 240 
Wauer, William, 273 

Weber, Max, 82, 233, 238 
Werkbund, 227 

Werkstaette, 227 

Wheelock, Warren, 243 
Whistler, 3, 86 


+ 


Wiegele, 227 he ee 

Wilde, Oscar, 345 a. 

Wilfred, Thomas, 167, 178, 236 

Witzmann, 227, 320 

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 223, 326, 369 

Wright, Willard Huntington, Foreword, 
150 


Yarrow, William, 242 
Yevreynoff, 346 
Young, Art, 368 


Zalkaln, Teidors, 273 
Zayas, de, 232 
Zorach, 243 

Zorn, 3 


383 


+ 


Qo 
\§ 62 
BO 


Mie a poet Var 44 ae 
| eee ‘ 1) i 


ey | - Z 
7 © 


pase cree 


vor 4 ih , vy if y A aay ; i" \¥.a¥ y a 4% by an % 
t ie aw “A ae ye! j i a Sila! de bay) AY a \! a oe 
sre ? b 7 » if j By ds ft wr , ms a. :" : ‘ ' 1” a J a i) Ba “h mie) 
in 7 Pa , \ 4 an | ¢ i 7 x oe of ‘De ry 
J i ‘ A Si ue | ¥ 
io] J | ) ’ / m ae ae pet ; h he “4 | - Tay’, 
7 4 S > WE ' vs é La o) 4 : j 
, Yolngu || \ om r Tv f Ny. : 
( a + iY Cis Ay ; ' ’ : ’ 
’ ‘ ' ; 
? | = i} t 
ern 
5 v y Ae 
" ' 1 I 
' 3 
; 
i } 
Ger 
be] 
~ 4 
: a 
‘ f Ps 
a 
; a 
4 
i 
\ 


ETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 


= 7 —_ 
EP a a a A A A A A a EE em, ag aie nie, 
Lomgria « - rt | Soe pc adlin le Sein ee a ee a len, Aa AEE em atin ene anny mar — Soe! 

ye AE A EF A le ote AE AO, al al dati, i do, ‘ j 

I A A ee A i, a i (a a el, lt a, . - 1 


LL I A OO A A ae a, Ol A le pe a an tn 


A, A AS le 


A be hl, te 


CO th) i ss, oe | 


ee oe 


; . é ‘ * ns a ae, eee, ‘ ei ae tan, Sry ci 
¥ ; / a —_, ae ya tengl a W, —_ gp age age age age gs ag gay ca el lle ow he eon ng nea net er a gh an 
"i | Ai y Al ral, nt a al, pn, a, cg a ry oes EE AE: ES IE: SI A + ae A ee, ER a, A, 


Nae See ap gl es mop mt meg pe ep gyn oe cpa age age Ma eee og nn Nigel gathers ep ee ee aE I ge pe mapa A ce, lh it lk 
7 ~ on ale lng clon, im, on te as Cg a rag a eh ag ag mage tpl ages Mae gh tag) ss eae ga a rahe 0 rae ee ee ee re a Nagel sa ne " " i, 
es mn - . 


Nd m @ 
— + >, 
- ee mY 


TE = 
Seovecsesets 
Slee 


ial 


= 
Nn Langdale rs aed 
nial 


Pee 


eo 
=> 
Li aaked 


po — a Lg ; ip detinded ale 
= 7 
a ad mo, 

ae 


Sy pnb ae ~ : 
ee oe rrp | i Z SS 
7 - — ( 7" r re ae SF eS ee 
ey ee et php epee =. SSS ee 
a Restate Seago pero 55 =r 
! cage on 


, Cited Lejeune jensen 
Pe an pn i pater el ma 
—¢. Lied Sat "enim = ba ! Y * on ope ngage ge mgt need ee any 
° ame = ae. a a — = =; * . 7 e 
son ee Nos =y > pelier ple am mts 7 S a 


Deke severe ae 


go, oes aye ep pet ee fake mea 
St pry epee ee 
| onl ania mn = ee a ae mn an ht ne phy Lan gil Re Ra, eiaby ns Ciel oe, i sammie ete tae. 
ade sans mene ree eT es ee Se Ye a ne ge os ye egy od ne ee i ey ae me am 
Se Bb pp nes we al ony nag ei, ee peal ya: mag ‘ naee 
pe rsa ert or Se Hgts bated er) th 7S Sere Sac . 
oe iad ~ 
ap ARIE, 


od mim (eas 
“ee - are, — ieriukienuene ee a br, oy pd ape ys pe ilmmeienoniee 
japan Sone pero, ce elton . : as =r rere “i S/n, gate 9 fp ie pe Se = an tl a recs ee ae 25-t ee 
Basra Te IST ENT eae ae ee See aa aeons Te Ie re eae See Sees : 


te Ape et ee ter a be By ae 
: (ae pate et RE IB es te 
hoe eel 


=y lial poledant Fe a ee oe Syaey te ae 
res — IE Aneel : ee memneesmam amd Se 
Sinope epceer eee tren - ae. en pe ee eset og oer eos FP a ce, a 5 > aj 7 es 
amet ae ip a neg mh yah ee ay = ons ag oes 
= = Ce en ae ne oe pre gee lg = el ganged ere Tee ee eT ee Oe eee Se ee 
REG pees ea noe ay eine caters we lg Slo aa ears OT adeiliee dial we aie aie an ae i a 
sere cs Ce teed (yan, paiead a uae je ro _— rk mee Rep hen bat] ainticleciaiedtadeialenta tte Seer ad tee Sale diied Mt i gh eet ee a ph Seen ike 
ee osee see ier ee Sep ee Se npanpyatet aie anieeueen en rg sarily AS Rh eat or a a a, tg me ma aa Hb sah A na je ly 
eet: AE SF . aie. od ed ctaviniertadciaitdiad he Al a a sy pt Nema a, oa baw meg Te bp aheauiedabaiiedet ses aS ik a Re I gh AEE Eo nrg 
; . lat mays mg pe ad se eres aps te ED bag 4 nee et 0 So ee be poe aah tj etry cains ce pamper, ple be se pow es com ae logger and 
oe SPE A Rk eee aye onl wr ap be " —~ a —_ pale a eeteord sap Sa ad il ay ee 9 PD Da a Rs be Se ag I gh en a ne ee sae yim a pa a 5 a, 
carer Ton rps mylene tal a tye oe be aad aD (at ay a Bh ag Ge a ao. td att miedentnieds theaea =~ ea Aerts ee SO ee a a a ae ah ne Sa ik aah soar) x 
ro i i ee pe Ne a _ — —_ ee eet ae aes & ae ae ‘sabe paled aaa diet iaae alee te ph erat my ak i 2 
Ca ert nape ene rae fi yom ci a be gear inlet Sai sain adam seas ane 


ied eae 
pete 32 popes So schter out pigieg Orn pe me A om eave yin im 
yee eae a) ord eel, biceps panindnidinnet ee eae pe om nae in st gn te ah fe ie na lt ae ego 6 tty met (ola > sony ms jana pee a eer eens i 
’ * woe - po sat ay a n 
fap Don opin leg yee gO Ne eee TE NE Pee Te ay ps ray — 
: oe : 


mi 
: - 
7 a Cee a) som ae Eh th ek a Ma ere Siaieladnetn jee el 
Spee yee NE Te TEE I ae eS ye ea aaa s eho aon eases Tae Te TeNe I OI ae ge yes an as aaa aaa ape TET SNES aa aera aT ese aes 
Se peer TpeESe: — — a, oe am ye ¢ oa 3: 


: 
tod =e + ae se ae aly e poy 2 omer 
eal che she ie = pc aay a. ; Sos a — ie ae, a es le co a | a re p= rs : 
Bet se Spa see rT Ses eee a ys gels oes aaa Toe oe Tere ee ese ag aes ee lg yh pate Sate pee eo mire ene 
eo ame Lo Ie ee i Se ey = * el pedeiiadaets tales b pao jaar yaa Srieittiabedaatinn ae lett cieenieibe ten a Siscie da ee ap te ES are ae pipet lame) an/ ait mania upped game a a 
rab ep a aeisalietadinlasiebeietotnaes Doe at | ee 7 oe —— = —- a ne ey oe ~ Aa eh 5 - etal oe prieceijain oe ar pe ry a — 
pap ama ems a ee ngs ah oe une = ~*, ST sep ae a i ph gt a | me - sept ; cole nope > aoe! area pt argh bps oie aes rgd megs) le = ebrereeipepecretetets 
et ye ee mae —— eri Co - =; aw sa Pina ey 1e peas mor pay a mapa Ci js ago ibs an ie ye! team, jae) ater irbetean ee et tn opi ae Peaniuin ean iiaivieacoinnde ee & 
odh alien Aatientemendall eye Me gh a ea = lala d Mea ae o~ Z — je ied foietieidatielidimetalad al Sra ‘alle Selltbiilil> damien deasees 71 . Doll sabeliunhlan Tote a J ceeded betes tek eal nt egpieandadel mp deel palol oer een Wf LF ng ie 9 bared yt tng yh ay gl ee. ay 
ay 6a ea A i a ph ar pl abt Mp. plan se beg and hana Oy cane ae ho aa 1 coral tah le od aged ag oro Prk wae ears Paap ot a ln yearly ote san gele yo pecbotete elae LO Goa mela ny a Ayr Ae A ot, ak > 
| mony ~ werescte ced palit: sates th cole patmateteaied atam tad atete id te ee ers arian al don a dua ine aang ee el bd udsmansthaaehanione nd Bea I Ny i Eas Yl ar le apa ps nell a ae ed meh cd gg Sn 
seine peenleiorie oe pian aoa gd Nagel aged ate irae ae! oe ae eptienin te Ie nian ee sete ja ard a re ant mh mag Dao tm Snag St nt it mh ek ol moped oy 2 yh ea Se ee ( MR UE A Co a eh EF ae ma ap tp 
rs 7 | se a ae o ae ep, ES et 2 ge ee ft Re me ot eat. Mani belied pee Sill ated saan sateecaiinad amie de Bele a te me yr ty) Saget tayed eset pel ar laid i eA eo ae m2) . + eye Tp we NE at a ad wep ner eg 
—< Nae an gh ey eg ote ah em ecitonaaedead = ear ys S hetadl Tpplonge ore A = Sa i es Asti! rae 9 oe frees 5 pe ape we wee bee eae pe oe - iedettedoen? etudaound rear a ee ee mee oes 4 Se ~ egal al ap ma ae meee al a Dr 
pl ae Soceetiadiaied ~- * ae fe ae yey ae b OP ee Dj igh largh coe ees Se bel Sie tool sie bios hameed —~ Peay eae pc a a pa ya To oped el cg trol age ap mere anges age - i a ee id cel pai cei n padieigade eee le a -_. 
fe etios = tn jet pal se ny in gh hago 1B gps or gal oar pa oe: ie rn ne leet nel iar’ ep a aa * ak na Sp oe bed ara ne hare angle Ce ae ee a aa a a oro geet teat sil cares cn gh asd mpeg apd ae ed — 
geese hep op ce cared ek ge yal pa te oa a al ar whe. in assem sijal ae leant aneh abet an deed Sen me eye mosh fa = ua py an a A ppcer or mpg cyl er age ae ~ ab ante bry eee eee 23235 siitese225 2iitl; 
aval ers ih ye sere tae ee ote sarees Fe aca ro I fe tara a my es iy Bo ee yea poae pea reans pt egy np fabaaniy clea tele tee elon at eer es SSeS eg set -_, ony = pee 
eo oylinrd eet on hepa Ne Cape hae eS aa lk gl a icieetiedinlted iat Talks teen pee PETE eet bide pale /, mit nae eledieiedinee jae ee pereean] aietos yi na Fy ae ae aa pte ie eed yds enor e oe wwe Re ee apl pT a eh ee ae ag mp age el a 
> ae ig oe et fe res a es ope Lied! OT 0A a A BR ag aw a rg I. Te je aay aw i ae | steeped oe Pat Sp Snlyedetpedbnd jae. pabedaapaabey anne —— cote ae ce ET 6 a) as a Ee + a ect. aN iain ct A ail seen ~ 
a=, oe 3 - a . aime yo ae ee a >< pale gd aieteedotinin eis adonmendi ae AP (a el! 5 a ae (pst seine epee GP ly lap, A AAR te (nite sale vane eee 
me ps pate Sole ee gel mee Lge Sedma nied nd nn en ee 7 PA ee paler pale Yor ae iain duel dite dite ne. ule meta im pale se 
ST ae apeliehiny sa I Mater ee et Ae 


